Immigration hardliner and Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu announced Monday he is beginning his second congressional bid after a scandal pushed him out of a 2012 bid for the House.
Babeu most recently dabbled in national politics when he briefed retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson on the state of illegal trafficking in Pinal County.
But the sheriff may be best known for a 2012 incident in which his former lover gave text messages and explicit photos of Babeu to local media and said the immigration hardliner threatened to deport him.
Babeu was elected as sheriff in 2008. His first congressional bid was in 2012, and the aforementioned scandal involving him and his former lover, a Mexican man with a questionable immigration status named Jose Orozco, tanked that bid.
Arizona Solicitor General David Cole cleared Babeu of any wrongdoing.
Babeu is running to represent an increasingly rural district, including Flagstaff, the suburbs of Tucson and the Navajo Nation. The seat will be vacant in 2016 as Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D) announced a run for U.S. Senate.
In 2014, the Arizona Republic reported, Babeu told “immigration-enforcement activists” the details of when and where buses of Central American children detained at the U.S.-Mexican border would be drop them off near Tucson. Protests, coupled with what the Republic called “totally predictable chaos,” swarmed the buses with kids. It turned out the buses were kids on their way to a YMCA camp — not detained immigrants. Then, Babeu played peacemaker.
Babeu vowed to continue to fight for stringent policies against undocumented immigrants and drug cartels.
“Stopping the flow of drugs and smuggling rings must be a priority of law enforcement and is a defined responsibility of the federal government,” Babeu said in a statement released Monday. “Our politicians have failed us time and again when it comes to securing our southern border. I will not rest until the federal government does its job so it is not left to the local sheriffs and police departments in border states to fend for themselves.”
