Went to the Republican's Lincoln Day Dinner on Sat night, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio was our keynote speaker. He was HILARIOUS. In a time where you have to refer to people from Mexico as "Hispanics" or "Mexican Americans," or whatever, Joe did not hold back by repeatedly saying the word, "Mexican." He is fed up with the illegals overrunning our state and our criminal justice system, and he's doing a lot about it.
Besides establishing the Tent City, Joe is also enforcing Federal Immigration Laws that the Feds won't enforce. His deputies arrest anyone who cannot prove citizenship, and if the Feds won't pick them up from the jail and deport them, then Sheriff Deputies load them up into buses and take them back to Mexico.
If an illegal is being held at the jail and his family comes to visit him, they must prove their citizenship. If they are illegal, they are taken into custody.
Joe says out of the 40,000 prisoners processed recently, over 10,000 of them were illegals. What does the public think? Well, when Joe established an illegal alien hotline number, for people to call if they suspect someone they know is in the country illegally--they got over 3,500 calls in the first few months.
Here are some more things we learned during Sheriff Joe's speech:
1. Inmates are fed twice a day: a bologna sandwich for "brunch" and a hot meal at dinner. It costs 55 cents per day to feed a prisoner.
2. Inmates sing the National Anthem every morning and God Bless America at bedtime.
If an inmate refuses to sing then their diet is switched to bread and water for 2 weeks.
3. All deputies and jail officers are to address inmates in English only. All signs at the jails and tent city are in English. An inmate is expected to learn English in order to communicate.
4. No pornographic magazines, no premium cable.
5. Chain gangs exist for men and women prisoners, and now there is a juvenile chain gang, for teens who have been charged as an adult in their case. They wear striped prison jumpsuits.
6. Temperatures in the Tents of Tent City reach over 130 degrees in the summer. Joe has reasoned with Amnesty International and the ACLU that if our soldiers in Iraq have to tolerate such heat in the same kind of tents, then these prisoners should be able to withstand it.
7. When the old jail facilities in downtown Phoenix became too old and outdated to use, Joe opened them up to the county animal control dept. They are now used to house the homeless dogs and cats, and they are air conditioned. Prisoners are trained to work with the animals and care for them while they await adoption.
