Trump's First Pardon Erases a Federal Conviction for Racial Profiling — and Tells Every Subordinate the Courts No Longer Matter

What Arpaio Was Convicted Of

For two decades as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio ran a department whose self-described mission was the rounding up of brown-skinned people. He housed federal pretrial detainees in outdoor tent camps where summer temperatures reached 145 degrees and forced inmates to wear pink underwear. His deputies pulled Latino drivers over for “looking Mexican,” held them while running immigration checks, and kept them detained even after federal authorities declined to act. In 2007 a class-action lawsuit forced the practice into federal court.

In 2011, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow ordered Arpaio’s deputies to stop. They did not stop. They kept doing it for eighteen months — at the explicit direction, the court found, of Arpaio himself. In 2013, Snow ruled that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had engaged in systematic racial profiling. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Arpaio with criminal contempt of court for ignoring Snow’s order. In July 2017, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton — a George W. Bush appointee — convicted him. She found that Arpaio had “willfully violated” the injunction by directing subordinates to keep detaining people the courts had specifically ordered released. He faced up to six months in jail. Sentencing was set for October.

He never got there. On the night of August 25, 2017, while Hurricane Harvey was making landfall in Texas and the country’s attention was on the storm, the White House announced that the president was pardoning Joe Arpaio. The pardon erased the criminal conviction. The 85-year-old former sheriff went home.

The First Pardon — and Everything It Skipped

Every president since John F. Kennedy had run pardons through the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice, a unit that reviews applications, gathers victim-impact statements, and consults the sentencing judge. Trump used none of it. There was no application. There was no DOJ review. There was no recommendation. There was no input from the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the case or from Judge Bolton, who had not yet handed down a sentence. By long-standing convention, presidents do not even consider pardons until a defendant has exhausted appeals; Arpaio had not appealed. Trump pardoned him before the appeals process could begin.

The pardon was, in formal legal terms, a nullification. By erasing the conviction itself, Trump told every law-enforcement officer in America that defying a federal court order — the foundational mechanism by which constitutional rights are enforced against police — could be undone by the president if the officer was politically aligned. Constitutional scholars, including the Federalist Society’s own Robert Reinstein, called it the most legally and ethically troubling pardon in modern American history. The American Bar Association issued a rare statement of objection. Even Senator John McCain — Arizona’s senior senator — denounced it as the president substituting “his political and personal interests for those of the American people.”

What the Pardon Was Designed to Signal

Arpaio was Trump’s earliest, loudest, most consequential national surrogate. He had spent 2011 demanding Obama’s birth certificate, deputizing his “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the [[2010-03-23-trump-birther-conspiracy|birther conspiracy]] Trump was simultaneously running on television. He endorsed Trump at the Iowa State Fair in 2016 before any establishment Republican would. The Phoenix rally Trump used to telegraph the pardon — “Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job. He’s going to be just fine, OK?” — was held in Arpaio’s home county, in front of Arpaio’s voters, two weeks before Arpaio’s sentencing date.

Read as a political payment, the pardon was tawdry. Read as a precedent, it was foundational. It told the Republican legal world that the federal contempt power — the courts’ last weapon against executive lawlessness — could be neutralized by a sympathetic president. It told the next generation of immigration enforcement officials that the courts would not protect anyone the administration wanted detained. And it set, in the first eight months of his presidency, the template Trump would use again and again: a pardon for [[2018-12-12-michael-cohen-sentenced-implicates-trump|witnesses against him]], for Manafort, for Stone, for Bannon, for Flynn, and ultimately, on his first day back in office, for the [[2025-01-20-trump-pardons-jan6-defendants|1,500 January 6 defendants]] who had attacked the Capitol on his behalf.

The pardon power exists to correct injustice. Trump’s first use of it was to declare that defying a federal judge to round up Latinos was not an injustice but a job well done. Everything that followed — the obstruction pardons, the coup-attempt pardons, the political-loyalty pardons — was built on that night in August 2017, when the country was watching a hurricane and a 85-year-old racist sheriff went home a free man.