MCSO Posse Member's Hate Speech Against Immigrants
by button nose Tuesday, Jun. 06, 2006 at 5:04 PM

Local member of Sheriff Joe's posse has anti-immigrant hate speech on his blog.

Whether you agree or disagree with Sheriff Joe Arpaio's and County Attorney Andrew Thomas's justification behind the arrests of immigrants for conspiracy to have themselves smuggled, you would probably agree that ideally the people arresting them should be unbiased- at least lacking in hate towards those they're arresting.

Turns out we have at least one immigrant-hater on Sheriff Joe's migrant hunting posse, officially called Illegal Immigrant Interdiction detail. A man whose alias is "Tarantulas" on the various internet forums on which he posts, has identified himself as being in Joe's posse, and has shared some information on an anti-immigrant messageboard, urging others to get involved with the posse (or, as he likes to call it, the Illegal Alien Interdiction detail, because "they're not really immigrants").

He's a supporter of the Minutemen, he's attended an anti-immigrant rally, and sure, he's entitled to his political opinion. But is it okay to have someone arresting immigrants who thinks a statement about killing immigrants is funny? In his report on a July 2005 anti-illegal immigration rally he said, "One guy came up and said... 'I disagree with your sign, mate. I think it should say "SHOOT" instead of "DEPORT."' I told him I would never advocate killing someone, and we both had a laugh." While we're left wondering what's to laugh about, it gets worse.

"Frankly, I would have shot them and put their bodies through a f*cking meat grinder," reads some August 22, 2005 commentary on the story about Casey Nethercott of a vigilante group called "Ranch Rescue" losing his ranch to immigrants who sued him for assaulting them with a gun. This commentary appears on a blog started by "Tarantulas."

And there's more: "The founding fathers would be furious if they saw what was happening in one of the original 13 states today what with the roaches…excuse me…illegal immigrants invading and breeding everyone else out of existence so that their benefits go up with the number of anchor babies they pop out." Whether he wrote these statements or not is unclear (they're posted under the name "SSP", rather than "Tarantulas" like most of the other posts), but this hateful violent language was never removed from his blog. We can only assume that a member of Sheriff Joe's posse advocates this hate speech.

From the moment we heard that Sheriff Joe's posse was going to be sent out to arrest undocumented immigrants, immigrants' rights activists such as myself were concerned that this was the crossover of Minuteman-type vigilantes and police officers- of extremism and institutional racism. Certainly, we can guess that a number of police officers are immigrant-haters, and we can imagine (others probably know) that a good deal of racial profiling occurs on the police force

But Sheriff Joe provides an opportunity for folks to get very little training, yet be able to go out with a gun and arrest undocumented immigrants. It's almost like handing a badge to the Minutemen- a border vigilante's wet dream, all for just a few dozen hours of training. This is scary, and must be stopped.

Sources:

The hate-speech posts (of probably many):
http://saveandromeda.com/wordpress/?m=200508
http://saveandromeda.com/wordpress/?cat=1
The post where he identifies himself as being in the posse
http://www.saveourstate.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12205
The July rally report: http://saveandromeda.com/wordpress/?cat=5
Where Tarantulas talks about starting his blog:
http://www.saveourstate.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1462&st=0
More on Sheriff Joe's Posse
http://posse.net/2006-05-22/index.htm

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