Joe Arpaio not only preyed upon people for no other reason than having brown skin, he smugly referred to his detention center as a “concentration camp”, where detainees (referred to as “f*****g wetbacks”) were routinely tortured, and several beaten to death, while tied down to a restraint chair. Men, women, and children were pressed into forced labor in the desert while being fed rations as meager as 30¢ a day and routinely denied even rudimentary medical care. At least 158 people died in his custody, many without having ever being convicted of a crime. Arpaio's use of the term “concentration camp” was clearly not hyperbole.
There isn't a dime's bit of difference between Arpaio's blatant racial profiling and the Reichpolizei stopping someone on the street and demanding their identity papers simply because they look vaguely Jewish but aren't wearing the requisite star. Despite Trump's unilateral pardon vacating Arpaio's criminal contempt of court conviction for willfully and flagrantly violating Federal court orders to comply with Federal civil rights and due process statutes, Arpaio has demonstrated a complete and utter contempt for human rights, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law, and an unwavering commitment to systemic institutionalized racism. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has only issued six warnings of incipient ethnic conflict in the last ten years. Those admonishments were addressed to Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria. On 18 August, the United States of America joined that august list, due to “the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” aided and abetted by the White House.
America would do well to heed their warning.
