In 2010, as Mayor of Richmond, CA, I presided over our City Council when we unanimously passed a resolution to boycott the State of Arizona for its SB 1070 law which expanded statewide the massive racial profiling and gross human rights violations that Sheriff Joe Arpaio was leading in Maricopa County.
Six years later, in November 2016, the voters of Maricopa County succeeded in firing the infamous sheriff, and he was recently convicted of criminal contempt for violating a 2011 order that barred him from detaining individuals solely based on suspicions about their legal status. He had ignored this order for years continuing illegal ‘round-ups’ and raids and detaining individuals for further investigation without reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed.
Trump, using his “divide and inflame” tactics, pardoned Arpaio last Friday. Trump threw gasoline into the racial fires. The nation is outraged and polarization has increased. I add my strongest condemnation to this pardon.
Rather than focusing on Trump and his playbook, I invite us to reflect instead on the long march of resistance, repudiation, organizing, and mobilizing that the citizens and residents of Maricopa county carried out, until last November when they successfully voted to reject Arpaio and his policies.
Many good people of Maricopa came together to attempt to recall Arpaio in 2007 and again in 2013. They failed to defeat him electorally on five occasions. But they organized better in 2016 by building coalitions. The “Basta Arpaio” coalition joined those supporting Proposition 206 to increase the state minimum wage. These mutually supportive campaigns went out knocking on doors, educating and registering voters. The good people of Maricopa won, even when Arpaio obtained as many votes in 2016 as he did back in 2000.
My campaign is a progressive grassroots organizing campaign, focused on organizing hundreds of new and existing corporate-free grassroots local organizations. There are important lessons for us in this story. People win with resistance, persistence, organizing, strategizing, building coalitions, not giving up, and embracing all those who want common goals.
Arpaio may have escaped this conviction, but the residents of Maricopa and Arizona have learned the path and the methods to achieve other victories for the people, and even perhaps justice for Arpaio’s crimes which include abuse of power, misuse of funds, racial profiling, failure to investigate sex crimes, improper clearance of cases, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, and election law violations.
We learn from our experiences, we share our experiences, we build the tools to transform our lives and limit oppression in all its forms.
Today I join all people of good will and in particular our Latina sisters and Latino brothers throughout this nation and we say: This is not over. We want justice. We will organize to have it.