Curiously, the meeting was not listed on the vice president’s schedule. But Arpaio told the Phoenix Business Journal that he’d said to Biden in their meeting that he needs more deputies and resources for his law enforcement unit.

Arpaio’s law enforcement actions, however, have not always gone over well with the Obama administration. The Arizona sheriff is under official investigation for civil rights violations, and just recently, the Department of Homeland Security revoked some of his powers to enforce federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.

Arpaio has insisted that he has all the powers he needs to arrest illegal immigrants anyway, and vowed not to let up on his much-publicized efforts to crack down on them.

Under the controversial 287(g) program, Arpaio had been allowed to check a suspect’s immigration status on the street as well as in jail after an arrest, and turn illegal immigrants over to federal authorities for deportation. But given that he’s faced a slew of lawsuits for abuse of that power, plus a civil rights investigation by the federal government, DHS recently revoked part of Arpaio’s authority.

Last week at a news conference, he distributed a document that cited a law that doesn’t exist and included a legal interpretation of federal law that came from a restrictionist group that’s been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Center for Immigration Studies had posted on its web site in 1999 a legal interpretation that said “state and local law-enforcement officials have the general power to investigate and arrest violators of federal immigration statutes without prior INS knowledge or approval, as long as they are authorized to do so by state law,” and that “evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens” is enough to constitute reasonable suspicion to authorize law police action. Arpaio used that language to justify continuing to arrest people he suspected of being illegal immigrants but who were not violating state criminal laws.

Arpaio had originally said he got the legal interpretation from a Cornell University Website, but a Cornell law professor told The Arizona Republic that the school’s Website contains no such thing, and that there actually is no law that says what Arpaio claimed in the document he distributed.

Even if the sheriff and his deputies can’t arrest anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant on the street, they can still check the immigration status of everyone in Maricopa County’s jails and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation. The Department of Justice is separately investigating Arpaio for allegedly abusing his authority by conducting unconstitutional searches and engaging in racial profiling.

DHS has promised to review all 287(g) agreements with individual counties, even as it has expanded the number of those agreements in effect.

“Our clients suffered egregious constitutional violations and were terrified when held against their will for three hours by armed [Maricopa County] personnel,” said Dan Pochoda, Legal Director of the ACLU of Arizona and lead counsel on the case, in a statement released today. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies had absolutely no reason to stop these two men and drag them off to a worksite raid. This is yet another example of MCSO sacrificing the rights and well being of workers in the name of immigration enforcement.”

The ACLU is representing Julian Mora, a legal permanent resident who has lived in the United States for 30 years, and his U.S. citizen son, Julio. The two claim they were the subjects of racial profiling — stopped while driving their truck for no reason other than being Latino.

The 66-year-old Julian Mora, who is diabetic, said he and his son were driving to work when a Maricopa County officers cut him off, then ordered the two men out of the truck, frisked and handcuffed them. The officers then transported the Moras to the worksite of Handyman Maintenance, Inc., where the officers were conducting a raid. The ACLU suit alleges the men were held there and denied food, water, or contact with the outside world for the next three hours. Neither was allowed to use the bathroom, although the older Mora has difficulty controlling his bladder due to his diabetes. He said he was finally allowed to urinate in a public parking lot.

The two men were eventually released later that day. They say they still don’t know why they were stopped.

But it was also a surprise to some immigrants rights’ advocates, who have been arguing for years now that the federal government’s program that deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws encourages just that sort of profiling of Latinos. As I wrote in a piece posted this morning, the Obama administration has just expanded that program to eleven more jurisdictions, despite serious complaints from a range of advocates and law enforcement officials that it undermines community trust in local police officers and encourages police to target people who look like immigrants.

Though the alleged abuses by Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona have gotten the most attention — mostly because he’s sought it out — studies from the General Accountability Office, Justice Strategies, the American Civil Liberties Union and others have found widespread complaints from communities who say the 287(g) program encourages police to target Latinos for minor or nonexistent crimes in an effort to get them deported.

President Obama may not be aware of this racial profiling controversy, but his Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano – a former political ally of Arpaio as Arizona governor — certainly is. Expect advocates to use Obama’s public acknowledgment of the problem to support their efforts to have the 287(g) abolished — or at least subjected to more careful scrutiny.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Maricopa County Sheriff's Office)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself using controversial tactics targeting illegal immigrants in Arizona. The chief law enforcement officer of Maricopa County and author of the book “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio boasts that he’s arrested some 30,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom he’s put to work on chain gangs, paraded in pink underwear before news cameras, and housed in sweltering plastic tents clustered behind coils of concertina wire.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But as William Finnegan recently documented in The New Yorker, Arpaio’s publicity stunts – enabled by a federal immigration program known as 287(g) that deputizes local authorities to enforce federal immigration laws — aren’t just humiliating. Prisoners have filed thousands of legal claims of abuse against Arpaio and his deputies – and by families of those who’ve died under his watch. A federal investigation found Arpaio’s deputies used “stun guns” on inmates strapped into restraint chairs; some have died in those chairs. One lawsuit brought by a dead prisoners’ family ended in an $8 million settlement after “a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoners, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”

Although Arpaio is now the target of a federal investigation for civil rights violations, he’s never lost his authority to enforce the federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is in charge of that program, and recently announced its expansion to 11 more jurisdictions. The former U.S. Attorney and then Governor of Arizona, Napolitano was reportedly allied with the politically popular Arpaio and long tolerated his abuses, referring at a press conference to the lawsuit she settled with him while a federal prosecutor as “lawyerly paperwork.”

In announcing the expansion of the 287(g) program, which conservative and restrictionist groups have long been encouraging, Napolitano hailed its success at supporting “local efforts to protect public safety by giving law enforcement the tools to identify and remove dangerous criminal aliens.”

“The 287(g) program is an essential component of DHS’ comprehensive immigration enforcement strategy,” said ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton on July 10. “The new agreement strengthens ICE’s oversight of the program and allows us to better utilize the resources and capabilities of our law enforcement partners across the nation.” Perhaps in part because of the 287(g) program, criminal prosecutions of immigrants over the past year were up almost 150% over five years ago.

That’s not an unmitigated success in the eyes of immigrants’ advocates, however.  Last week, 25 civil rights and community groups denounced DHS’s plans to expand the 287(g) program, citing previous findings of its abuse.

“DHS is fully aware that the abusive misuse of the 287(g) program by its current slate of agencies has rendered it not only ineffective, but dangerous to community safety,” said Andrea Black, Coordinator of the Detention Watch Network in a statement. “It is surprising Napolitano did not simply shut this program down,” she added. “Expanding this failed program is not in line with the reform the administration has promised.”

In addition to expanding the program’s reach, Napolitano promised to create new standardized agreements between DHS and local law enforcement authorities that would specify the extent and limits of local authority and emphasize that the point is to stop violent crime, not to apprehend undocumented immigrants. Those limits have been criticized by some restrictionist groups who support the current program.

Those changes attempt to respond to a report released in March by the General Accountability Office, which concluded that the 287(g) program, instead of concentrating on serious crime as intended, was being used by some local police to have immigrants deported for such minor infractions as speeding, carrying an open container of alcohol and urinating in public. Advocates have also claimed the program encourages widespread racial profiling.

The new standardized agreements do little to get at the problem, critics claim. In fact, it may make the situation worse by concealing how the program operates.

The changes make “no serious attempt at discouraging illegal racial profiling or reducing the conflict between sound community policing principles and the expansion of this program,” said Omar Jadwat, staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, in a statement issued last week. In addition, “the new MOA [Memorandum of Agreement] actually takes several disturbing steps backward, particularly in the area of transparency.”

For example, the new agreement restricts the release of information about the program and its use, saying all information “obtained or developed as a result of this MOA is under the control of ICE and shall be subject to public disclosure only pursuant to the provisions of applicable federal laws, regulations, and executive orders.” Documents created by the agency or developed pursuant to the agreement “shall not be considered public records.”

“ICE claims that they have responded to a lot of the concerns around the 287g program,” says Brittney Nystrom, legal director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants’ advocacy group. But “the language in the new standardized agreement is not substantially different than the old agreement. In some ways it’s even a step backward.”

The tightly controlled information is one of those steps back, she says. “More data is needed around the 287g program,” specifically concerning who is being arrested and whether the arrest is for a minor infraction or a serious crime. “That would address whether these are pretextual arrests” — arrests that use the immigration laws to target generally law-abiding immigrants — “or whether ICE is doing what it claimed, focusing on serious dangerous criminals. If most arrests are for things like traffic violations or fishing without a license, that would raise a red flag.”

The new agreement doesn’t specify whether DHS is collecting that kind of data, but it does specify that any data it does collect will not be made public. “Before it was not clarified one way or the other,” said Nystrom. “It’s always been a concern that data collection is insufficient. Any change that would limit the amount of data around these programs is a step in the wrong direction,” she said.

DHS shouldn’t have expanded the program without first determining whether the changes solve the problems, say many advocates. “Any changes should have been made first, and evaluated before expanding the program,” said Nystrom.

Past abuses of the program include the deportation of a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen to Mexico, the shackling of an undocumented pregnant women in labor, and the arrest of an immigrant who’d called on police to protect her sister from domestic violence. Many more have reportedly been deported under the program despite being lawful residents or having legitimate claims to remain in the United States.

Such incidents have generated widespread fear in immigrant communities, say advocates and many law enforcement officers. The head of a national police officers’ association in March testified to Congress that the program actually hurts law enforcement efforts because it drains resources and “undermines the trust and cooperation with immigrant communities that are essential elements of community policing.”

In February, Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research organization, found that 87 percent of jurisdictions participating in the program did not have high crime rates but were “undergoing an increase in their Latino populations higher than the national average.” Instead of focusing on serious crime, Justice Strategies found, “police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights.”

Although the new DHS agreements now state more clearly the program’s objectives, “not mentioned in there is how they’ll enforce those priorities,” said Joan Friedland, Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center.

The new agreement attempts to address racial profiling and pretextual arrests by requiring law enforcement to pursue criminal charges to their resolution.  But advocates say it’s not clear what that means, or if that will really address the problem.

“Will police interpret that as, we have to convict people? What happens to deferred prosecution?” asked Friedland. In the past, police could defer prosecution for a minor crime in exchange for a monitored period of good behavior.

“If they’re trying to combat profiling and pretextual arrests we applaud them for their intent,” said Nystrom. “I’m just not sure this is the right path.”

So what better gift than swine flu?

According to The Arizona Republic, Arpaio — who’s also starring in a new Fox reality show — is now instructing his deputies working on the streets and in the jails where they might encounter illegal immigrants to wear protective gear if they fear they’ve come in contact with someone infected with the deadly swine flu.

According to The Republic:

The sheriff’s office will make masks, gloves and other measures available to 750 deputies working the streets and will add extra deputies trained to identify suspected illegal immigrants based on the theory that some of those inmates might have come from areas in Mexico where the infection was rampant, said Lt. Brian Lee, a sheriff’s spokesman.

“Sheriff Joe,” as he’s known, also made a point of warning that infectious diseases could proliferate throughout the United States if the country doesn’t quickly reinforce its border with Mexico.

The new protective gear is specifically designed “for the arrest of illegal immigrants,” but also “to keep deputies from exposing themselves to infected people before they learn of the suspect’s legal status in the country, Lee said deputies would be encouraged to protect themselves if they come into contact with anyone exhibiting signs of the flu- no matter where the suspect appears to have come from.”

According to The Associated Press, The Justice Department wrote in a letter that it will focus on alleged patterns of police discrimination based on national origin. As I noted the other day, Arpaio is already being sued in a civil case for exactly the same thing.

Arpaio, as he has before, denied the charges yesterday, and said he’ll cooperate with the Justice Department’s probe. “If they want to come down, let them come,” he told The Associated Press. “We’ll open our books. We have nothing to hide.”

Immigrants’ rights advocates were thrilled with today’s news, and used the opportunity to reiterate their call for a thorough review of the federal government’s 287(g) program, which delegates to local sheriffs like Arpaio broad powers to enforce the immigration laws, which critics claim lead to ethnic and racial profiling.

Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice, issued the following statement today:

“The news of the DOJ investigation is a welcome first step towards re-establishing justice in Maricopa County. We are confident that the investigation will reveal the Arpaio approach to law enforcement for what it really is – un-American, ineffective, and anti-Latino.  As a result, we expect Arpaio’s authority to check immigration status under the 287(g) program to be terminated.”

“Sheriff Arpaio’s actions have long been the best example of why the federal government needs to take back control of immigration enforcement.  While Arpaio’s abuses are particularly vile, we support [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano’s call for a full review of the 287(g) program and were troubled by the recent GAO report questioning its effectiveness.

Napolitano’s review should ensure that communities continue to have good relationships with their local police departments, not be scared of them.  The only real solution is enacting immigration reform law that secures our borders, legalizes undocumented workers, and re-establishes a coordinated intergovernmental immigration strategy.  This remains our best path forward to fix a broken system and guard against future abuse.”

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother’s wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

“My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security,” Irfan said. “The only thing my brother said was, ‘Wow, the jets are right next to my window.’ I think they were remarking about safety.”

According to the article, five of the six adults in the party were of South Asian descent, and the men all wore beards while the women wore traditional headscarves. Kashif Irfan is an anesthesiologist and his brother, Atif, is a lawyer. Both were born in Detroit and currently live in Alexandria, Va. They said they suspected they were profiled because of their appearance, which AirTran disputed.

“At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them,” [AirTran spokesman Tad] Hutcheson said. “Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.”

I realize that many people in this country want airlines to target Muslims for additional security screening, which, even if you agree with that idea, this seems a bit excessive. I’m not sure this approaches the level of impropriety of, say, someone joking that he had a bomb in their bag at the ticket counter.

More importantly, if you don’t agree with targeting travelers based on race, think about why. If a white person made a similar comment, it is very unlikely that anyone would even take notice. And that’s the point: If it was inappropriate for a Muslim, then it would also be inappropriate if someone like, say, myself said the same thing.

At the very least, the airline could have rebooked them on another flight after they were cleared.