The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is getting funds to hire 15 new deputies whose main job will be to arrest illegal immigrants and human smugglers.
Those deputies will be mostly enforcing Arizona’s anti-coyote law. The sheriff’s office has been using the law to arrest the people who are smuggled across the border as conspirators with human smugglers.
Deputies have arrested 523 illegal immigrants under the law in the last year, according to sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Paul Chagolla.
The funds will come from the state Legislature, which doled out $2 million earmarked for the enforcement of the anti-coyote law, which became effective in August 2005, and a 15 percent match approved Wednesday from Maricopa County.
Some of the new deputies also may receive training from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has agreed to train as many as 160 deputies and detention officers to enforce federal immigration laws, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.
“We will continue to fight with more resources,” Arpaio said. “We’re going to keep enforcing that law and enforcing the federal law under the ICE umbrella.”
