Laurie Roberts' Columns & Blog

Taking a whack at Arpaio -- the wrong way

During Monday's Cince de Mayo celebration, a human rights group invited people to step right up at take a whack at America's toughest sheriff. The group actually strung up a three-foot tall pinata with Arpaio's face on it and proceeded to beat the sweets right out of the thing.

Ray Ybarra of the Puebla Center for Legal and Human Rights, told KTAR that the Hispanic community is fed up with Sheriff Joe Arpaio targeting people because of the color of their skin and as such he has no problem with encouraging people to take a symbolic stick to the sheriff.

``The real violence is coming from the sheriff," Ybarra said. "He's out there separating families. He's the one that, as a result of his actions, someone comes home to an empty house. A child comes home and the parent's not there."

Ybarra went on to say that it's Arpaio who's sending the wrong message -- not him. "He's saying that human beings are not equal, that people do not have the right to live where they want to live, go to school where they want to go and love who they want to love. Unfortunately, I think he's the one creating all this violence and hatred in our community and not us."

Now, I don't know who Ray Ybarra is and I've never even heard of the Puebla Center for Legal and Human Rights, but the guy's not doing the Hispanic community he claims to speak for any favors.

I've been critical of Sheriff's Joe's crime suppression patrols on the grounds that he's unfairly targeting Hispanic Americans, isn't being particularly effective in sweeping up large numbers of illegal immigrants and should be putting his efforts into going after the most dangerous of the illegal immigrants.

But to say that it's his fault that families are being separated? Oh please. He's not the one who chose to sneak into the country and he's not the one who put illegal immigrants into their present predicament. And yes, I imagine the sheriff would say that people do not have the right to live where they want to live if they didn't come here legally. In fact, I imagine most of us would

I sometimes wonder where some of these so-called "leaders of the Hispanic community" come from. But since Mr. Ybarra claims to be one of them, he should know that doing anything to promote the idea of violence toward a law enforcement officer in these turbulent times is irresponsible.


Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 03:02 PM
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Topics: AZTALK, REPUBLIC COLUMNISTS, Immigration

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