After winning reelection Tuesday, controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio has sent mixed messages regarding his crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
On the one hand, CNN reported, Arpaio indicated that wanted to meet with Latinos about his policies.
"I would hope to get together with the Latino community, if I could ever have them talk to me without screaming and threatening me," Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told supporters as election results came in Tuesday night. "So I hope to get together with the community and try to explain what we do, so that's going to be one of my missions coming up."
However, he also promised his backers, he would continue to enforce his stringent-and contentious-immigration policies.
"I have a message for the president of the United States of America. He's gone after me from the White House, the Department of Justice, the FBI, I can go on and on. But I will continue to enforce all the laws, including illegal immigration," Arpaio told supporters. "Nothing changes."
Arpaio won his sixth term on Tuesday, defeating his Democratic opponent, Paul Penzone, who conceded after 10 p.m., the Huffington Post reports.
As of Nov. 8, KTAR.com projected Arpaio garnered 53 percent of the vote, or 446,462 voters, while Penzone netted 358,075 votes for 43 percent of the vote.
But Arpaio's win was not without controversy, as Latino advocate groups and Penzone supporters claimed that hundreds of thousands of early provisional votes from Democratic stronghold areas with heavy Latino populations have not been counted.
Randy Parraz of the Hispanic rights group Citizens for a Better Arizona, told the Huffington Post that his group would be meeting outside the county election board office Wednesday to insist all provisional votes be counted quickly.
"We're not conceding anything until every vote is counted," he said. "They're just going to act like, 'Oh, the election's over, Arpaio wins.' Hell no."
A record number of undocumented immigrants were deported from Arizona in 2010, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reporting 92,592 deportations, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman told KPHO.com in 2010.
As CNN reports, both the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Justice Department have filed lawsuits accusing Arpaio of civil rights violations and racial discrimination against Latinos.
Last December, the Justice Department said it had found cause to believe Arpaio's office "has engaged in a pattern of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law" through measures targeting Latinos. Those measures include traffic stops, detentions and arrests and against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency by punishing them and denying them critical services.
Arpaio has denied the charges. One of the sheriff's lawyers told CNN that the federal investigation against his client was a "witch hunt."
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