Thom Hartmann: It’s talk radio and TV for the sane among us, Thom Hartmann here with you and on the phone with us, we started the program with Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Now with us Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, California. And Sheriff, you were on the program in April when this law was first being proposed, you said that 1070, the show me your papers please law in Arizona which is going into effect tomorrow - did I say something other than Arizona? Oh I said, I’m sorry, in Arizona - was a bad idea. And it goes into effect tomorrow.

First of all, I’m curious your thoughts on what’s going on right now in Arizona, sir? And welcome back to the program.

Clarence Dupnik: Thank you very much, Thom. I’m happy to be back. What’s going on right now is, there’s a lot of things going on. As a matter of fact some of it is rather chaotic. And one of the reasons I think that we have such chaos is that the public has been grossly misinformed about what’s really going on. This law that’s being referred to as a ‘tough immigration law’ isn’t tough at all. As a matter of fact, the legislature has created a misdemeanor law which is very, very difficult for law enforcement to deal with. And not only that, when they first created the law there was such an outcry, especially from people like myself, and I think you probably had me on the show screaming about it.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, we did, yeah.

Clarence Dupnik: That they changed it a few days later. And now they’ve changed it in a way that is more acceptable, as far as enforcement is concerned. However, you know, the good news is that we’ve had scores of lawyers looking at this for a couple of months. They all agree that it’s a very, very complicated law and our lawyers are telling us that we can continue to enforce the federal law which we’ve been doing all along. If we were to start enforcing the state law, which some of the law enforcement agencies apparently are going to do, we would have… right now we come across illegal aliens, we give them to the border patrol. We’ve been doing that for 50 some years. That’s no cost to the tax payer.

Thom Hartmann: Right and you’re a border county, aren’t you?

Clarence Dupnik: That’s a fact. And all of a sudden if we said, okay we’re not going to give them to the border patrol anymore, we’re going to put them in the Pima County Jail. We are arresting over 200 a month. And if the other…

Thom Hartmann: You’re going to have to start building prisons.

Clarence Dupnik: …agencies in our county started doing that, we would throw our local criminal justice system, we would overwhelm them, we would put the jail into a crisis, and we’d have to send the tax payers a huge bill and then turn them over to the border patrol. What sense does that make? I don’t understand it.

Thom Hartmann: Right, none at all to me. There is a bus load of people, the AFL-CIO in Los Angeles has organized a group of people who are on their way to Phoenix right now to show up and protest this law and by the way, not show their papers. Sheriff Joe says he’s going to arrest anybody who gets out of line who is breaking the law. The private prison lobbyists, I understand, it has now been revealed, are, have been heavy lobbyists for this 1070 'show me your papers please' law in Arizona thinking that, apparently thinking that there’s a growth industry here with people being thrown into jail.

I’d like your thoughts on all those. And the big question that I asked Sheriff Joe which is, you know, he was talking about going into businesses and busting the workers. And I said, why aren’t you putting the white guy employers, the rich white guys in jail? It seems to me that when 20, 30, 40 rich white guys in this country do high profile perp walks and you see them on Cops that all of a sudden there’s not going to be so many people coming to this country looking for work.

Clarence Dupnik: Boy, Thom, you stated it very well and I agree with everything that you said. First of all we have an employer sanctions law. But it’s almost impossible to enforce and the responsibility is on our county attorneys, your district attorneys, to do that and they have state funds in order to do it.

So if we, if I as the sheriff decide to go out and start trying to bust, the first thing that’s going to happen is our county attorney is going to say wait a minute you don’t have all the grounds necessary to do this because this law is very complicated, it’s very difficult for me as a county attorney to get a conviction in court.

Thom Hartmann: Right. Yeah you picked them up yesterday, they don’t even speak English, what are you going to do. Yeah. This is nuts.

Clarence Dupnik: And that’s a fact. For example, just in this latest law that they’ve passed, we have to prove that the illegal immigrant has been in this state for 30 days. Now how the hell are we supposed to do that?

Thom Hartmann: Right. Yeah, you picked them up yesterday, they don’t even speak English, what are you going to do? Yeah. This is nuts.

Clarence Dupnik: It is nuts. And this is nothing more than a political charade in my opinion. This law was passed to try to deflect the very, very poor job that our state government and our state legislature has been doing the past two years. We are just in a miserable, the state of economics and our state is ?? but we are one of the worst.

Thom Hartmann: And let’s be honest about it, the federal government, ever since basically Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against employers in ’86 after the Amnesty, the federal government has not been much help in terms of pushing back against the guy, I refer to them as the rich white guy employers, they’re not all white and they’re not all rich but you get the point. It seems to me that if the magnet wasn’t there, the iron filings wouldn’t be showing up.

Clarence Dupnik: I agree with you but if you go back the 8 years of the Bush administration, he tried, President Bush tried for 8 years to get immigration reform passed and it was his own party that blocked it.

Thom Hartmann: Right, yeah. And this is, it’s a shame that this has become partisan because we have a problem in this country. We have a labor problem, we have a, we have a humanity problem too. I mean, this has gone on for roughly 30 years since Reagan’s amnesty and as a consequence you’ve got people who have kids who are American citizens who have married American citizens. There has to be some rational way to work all this stuff out.

Clarence Dupnik: And you’re only going to do that with reform in the immigration section but that’s not going to happen because the right wingers are going to start screaming amnesty every time we try to do that and it’s just not going to happen.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. Even though their patron saint Reagan was the one who did the amnesty and nobody is suggesting amnesty now. It’s so ironic. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County, PimaSheriff.org the website. Sheriff we have just a couple of second left, what would you suggest people do?

Clarence Dupnik: I would suggest that they just relax and understand this for what’s really going on. The fact of the matter is…

Thom Hartmann: That this is political theater?

Clarence Dupnik: Their local law enforcement agencies are already enforcing the federal law and that’s what we ought to continue to do.

Thom Hartmann: There you go. And that what’s going on in Arizona at the level of your governor Jan Brewer is political theater.

Clarence Dupnik: You got it.

Thom Hartmann: Okay. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, one of the good guys. PimaSheriff.org, his website, check it out.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.