Sheriff Arpaio has not backed down. At an event on Saturday, he told reporters: “I am going to fight this. I’m not going to resign like some of my critics want me to do. And I am going to be re-elected, and I will continue serving this county.”

Sheriff Arpaio’s lawyer, Mel McDonald, said that the sheriff would plead not guilty by a court filing and that he hoped to prevail before a jury.

The court set a tentative trial date of Dec. 6.



Here are milestones in the long-running case.

DECEMBER 2007 A Mexican citizen legally in the United States sued Sheriff Arpaio and his Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office deputies, claiming to have been unlawfully detained for nine hours after a traffic stop because of his ethnicity. Others joined the lawsuit, and the allegations were expanded to include several other examples of treatment that plaintiffs said unfairly singled out Latinos.

Judge G. Murray Snow of United States District Court in Phoenix eventually gave the lawsuit class-action status, allowing any Latino stopped by Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies since Jan. 1, 2007, to be represented in the case.

DECEMBER 2011 Judge Snow issued a ruling prohibiting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from stopping and detaining Latinos based only on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally, and barring deputies from using only such suspicions to report a vehicle’s Latino occupants to the federal immigration authorities.