Go, Joe, go! Away, that is.

Maricopa County’s oft-maligned Sheriff Joe Arpaio found his way into the national spotlight again earlier this week, this time for continuing to carry out his controversial “crime suppression” sweeps without permission from the federal government.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials recently clipped Arpaio’s proverbial wings, stripping the Sheriff’s Office of the authority to enforce federal immigration laws while stopping suspect criminals on the street.

They didn’t take from him the ability to process people who are in this country illegally. He can still check the immigration status of people who are taken to his jail for other crimes.

What the decision did bar Arpaio from doing was carrying out his warrantless “sweeps” in which he hunts for undocumented immigrants by raiding local businesses and stopping drivers in Hispanic neighborhoods for minor traffic violations, actions that his critics claim is both racial profiling and a violation of the constitutional right to protection from unlawful searches and seizures.

Though ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Obama administration and basically the entire country outside Arizona are against him, Arpaio continues to assert his right to detain people he believes are here illegally.

In a news conference last week, he cited a document containing a provision of Title 8 of the federal code and language that gives state and local law-enforcement officials the power to investigate and arrest immigration violators “without prior INS knowledge or approval, as long as they are authorized to do so by state law.”

The document outlines conduct that can be used as probable cause to investigate a person’s immigration status, such as “evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens.”

The document is clear about what’s allowed, and Arpaio and his deputies follow it to the letter. But here’s the problem: The law doesn’t actually exist.

The document Arpaio so readily waved around originated from a legal interpretation the Federation for American Immigration Reform published on its Web site in 1999. It’s been reposted by numerous border-control and anti-immigrant groups, but exists nowhere in actual federal code.

Arpaio has himself admitted that of the 33,000 arrests of illegal immigrants his office has made in the past two years, only about 300 have been arrested during “crime suppression” operations. The rest were arrested under the agreement allowing the sheriff to check the immigration status of people in jails.

In a recent New York Times article, he called those 300 arrests symbolically important.

“It has to do with public perception,” he said in the article.

Sadly, the sheriff seems astoundingly unaware of what the public’s perception of him actually is.

Whether simply stubborn or slipping into senility, it’s obvious that the sheriff is no longer interested in following the laws he’s supposed to enforce. He panders to the opinion of misinformed, xenophobic citizens, who incredibly continue to vote him into office despite his numerous misuses of manpower and taxpayer money.

It’s up to the citizens of Arizona to see through their prejudices to the facts: Arpaio doesn’t suppress crime. He encourages racism, denies people their basic rights as granted by the Constitution and embarrasses Arizona.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until 2012 to oust him from office.

One can only hope that Arizona voters pay close attention to the sheriff until then and make him go when his time comes.

Reach Zach at zachary.fowle@asu.edu.