It is indeed a different planet Arpaio has created. In 2007 he set up a hotline where residents could report people they believed to be in the country illegally. Latinos in Maricopa are four to nine times more likely to be pulled over by deputies than non-Latinos, their homes can be searched without a warrant, they can be detained without cause, and can be sent to jail for 13 days for failing to use a turn signal.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded its three-year investigation into the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and one federal investigator called it the “most egregious” case of “racial profiling in the United States.” Arpaio preferred to call them “crime-suppression operations,” but his immigration sweeps were thinly veiled excuses to act as Border Patrol, stopping anyone with brown skin. One especially besieged town was Guadalupe, a Phoenix suburb of 5,500 people, where businesses post signs in Spanish. Today, 72 percent of the town’s citizens are of Latino origin. Arpaio turned it into his own U.S.-Mexico border war after Guadalupe’s then mayor, Rebecca Jimenez, defied him as he spoke to TV reporters during an immigration sweep and said she didn’t want his deputies back in her town the next day.

“You said you didn't want us back here tomorrow. Is that what you said?" Arpaio asked.

"Well,” he said, “we will be back here tomorrow. Full force!"

And they were.

Arpaio continued his sweeps in Guadalupe, and across the county, even after the federal government took away his legal ability to do so in 2010, and even after a federal judge’s issued an injunction in 2012 that forbade him from doing so. This is what landed him in court. It began in 2007 when Arpaio’s deputies pulled over a car in which Manuel Ortega Melendres, a Mexican citizen in the country on a valid visa, was a passenger. Deputies said they stopped the car for speeding, but they never issued a citation. Even though Ortega had proper identification, deputies arrested him and sent him to county jail so an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official could look over his papers. He was eventually let go. Then in 2008 deputies stopped a brother and sister, both U.S. citizens, checked their IDs, released them. But other deputies stopped them further down the road and held them at gunpoint. These became two cases in a class-action suit against the sheriff’s department brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, cases that eventually gained the attention of federal investigators.

By 2011 Arizona U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ordered Arpaio to stop detaining people solely based on the belief they were in the country illegally. Arpaio continued to do so. In 2012—also an election year—Arpaio appeared in court at a six-day bench trial where he testified his department does not “arrest people because of the color of their skin.” Arpaio won that year’s election, and by 2013 the judge ruled his department had indeed arrested people based on the color of their skin. From now on the sheriff’s department was supposed to comply with the federal court’s remedies to fix racial profiling. Arpaio never did (three years out he still hasn’t). And he didn’t try to hide his defiance either. In a video shot in 2013, Arpaio’s chief deputy tells his agents the racial-profiling order is “ludicrous” and “crap.” Arpaio tells the deputies, “We don’t racially profile, I don’t care what everybody says.”