Emily Mills

There are days I imagine Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke wakes up, gets dressed, puts on his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and looks in a mirror to practice saying, “You don’t look like you’re from around here.”

Clarke has made a name for himself as a darling of the far right through his bombastic and often dangerous rhetoric. He’s made virulently xenophobic, anti-immigrant and pro-gun statements and has gone to great lengths to get publicity for his comments on those subjects and more, including how he thinks the Black Lives Matter movement is a “hateful ideology.” Clarke also is a huge Donald Trump cheerleader and Scott Walker supporter, though he runs as a Democrat in every election.

Certainly, he’s won a lot of support for all that tough talk. Now he’s looking to capitalize and go national. This week, Clarke sent a letter to a top federal official asking that he and his officers be given “the power to perform the function of immigration officers, especially at the Milwaukee County Jail.”

Despite both iterations of Trump’s immigration ban being met by widespread public condemnation and legal challenges, Clarke wants to hop on that bandwagon and ride it off into the sunset. He claims that illegal immigrants pose a grave danger to citizens and wants his officers to receive the four-week training that would grant them authority to interview, arrest and detain anyone thought to be in violation of immigration laws.

There are several things wrong with this.

This kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric leads to gross stereotyping and racial profiling. It’s the “papers please” situation all over again, where law enforcement begins to see every person of color as a potential suspect (despite plenty of immigrants being white, too). If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Not many people in the country illegally are dangerous, of course. The truth is that undocumented immigrants contribute billions in state and local taxes paid, equaling some 8% of their average total incomes (more than Trump could say). The majority are not violent criminals, either, but rather regular folks just trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. Trump and Clarke’s approach doesn’t see a difference and paints with a broad, clumsy brush. We’ve already seen too many stories of ICE agents aggressively seeking out and arresting productive members of society, breaking up families, sending people back to unsafe places or countries they don’t even remember.

If Clarke and his ilk actually want to focus on real threats to our communities, he would spend more time, say, investigating and arresting murderers and rapists. However, FBI statistics show Milwaukee County deputies were involved in investigating no murders and only five rapes from 2012 to 2014. And while people have been dying in the jail his office oversees, Clarke would rather cover that up and threaten anyone making the information public.

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Throughout it all, Clarke has been swaggering across the country, giving speeches and raking in gifts (including guns, scopes and a free cruise). His speaking fees and travel reimbursements earned him nearly double what he makes from his salary. All that time spent out-of-state, not doing his job, seems to finally have put a dent in his image with Milwaukee County voters, at least, with his approval numbers at an all-time low of just 31%.

Turns out more than just ranchers understand the meaning behind the phrase “all hat, no cattle.”

Clarke has at least until his next election bid (or a position in the Trump administration) to do plenty of damage, though, the extent of which cannot be underestimated or understated. Groups such as Voces de la Frontera are rightly working to stand up to his dangerous tactics, but we all need to stand united against such divisiveness.

Regardless of where a person looks like they’re from, we’re all human beings and deserving of fair treatment. Even Clarke, who deserves a fair election to see him out of office and relegated to the disgraceful footnote he’s become. He can take the big hat with him.

Emily Mills is a freelance writer who lives in Madison. Twitter: @millbot; Email: emily.mills@outlook.com