U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow has refused to end the court oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office — because the office hasn’t stopped violating the Fourth Amendment’s unreasonable-seizure clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee that the 2007 Melendres v. Arpaio settlement was designed to remedy.
In his 72-page ruling issued Sept. 10, Snow found that the racial disparities in traffic stops that prompted the oversight — illegal stops, searches, and arrests targeting Latino motorists — remain on the record. Hispanic motorists are 40 percent more likely to be arrested than white motorists, are stopped 30 percent longer, and are 2.5 times more likely to be searched, according to an analysis of the sheriff’s own traffic reports by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor, filed on behalf of the plaintiffs. Snow treated those figures as proof the constitutional violations haven’t been remediated. He was right to do so.
The county’s argument for ending oversight is simple: the violations belonged to Joe Arpaio’s administration, the department has reformed its policies, and the cost of continued monitoring — hundreds of millions of dollars — is too high. Sheriff Jerry Sheridan, who took office in January 2025, inherited the settlement from Arpaio’s era. A 2025 evaluation by the court-appointed monitor found compliance with more than 90 percent of the settlement’s requirements. Sgt. Joaquin Enriquez, a department spokesperson, said the office “has implemented durable remedies for violations that occurred 19 years and three administrations ago.”
That is the steel-man version of the county’s position: the reforms have worked, the oversight is an outdated burden, and the constitutional harm has been addressed.
The audit version is different.
The constitutional violations at issue in Melendres are Fourth Amendment seizure violations — unreasonable stops, searches, and arrests based on race — and Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection violations: the systematic, documented differential treatment of Latino motorists by Maricopa County deputies. The settlement requires continuous compliance for three years before oversight can end. It has not met that standard. Snow found that the disparities the case was built to address persist. The county’s own traffic-stop data, analyzed by an independent expert, confirms it.
Sheridan has personally disputed Snow’s findings. In 2016, he was found in civil contempt for denying knowledge of a court order to stop making illegal immigration arrests — a finding he has contested. Snow’s opinion mentions Sheridan 30 times. The judge’s language is specific: Sheridan was found to have “abused his authority over MCSO’s internal affairs process by obstructing and manipulating misconduct investigations and disciplinary proceedings — including those involving himself — to shield deputies and Command Staff from accountability and undermine the enforcement of remedies designed to address the constitutional violations against the Plaintiff class.” That is not a characterization of a sheriff who inherited a clean house. It is a judicial finding of obstruction of the very remedial process the settlement requires.
The county’s cost complaints — that oversight has been “unelected and unaccountable” and has “cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars” — are undercut by the court’s own audit of the sheriff’s office spending. Court findings shared in 2025 showed that nearly 72 percent of the office’s spending was misattributed or misappropriated. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement. The county’s cost framing is not a measure of oversight burden. It is a measure of the office’s failure to track its own spending — itself a compliance failure.
The Trump administration’s DOJ Civil Rights Division has withdrawn support for continued oversight, informing the court in January that it backs the county’s position. That withdrawal is a policy choice, not a legal finding. The constitutional violations at issue in Melendres are Fourth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment claims adjudicated by a federal court under Article III jurisdiction. The DOJ’s decision to stop supporting the remedies it once defended does not change the constitutional record.
Maricopa County’s case sits within a broader pattern. Earlier this year, a federal court found Border Patrol immigration sweeps in California to have violated its orders. The same structural dynamic — federal enforcement agencies claiming they’ve reformed while courts find the violations persist — recurs across jurisdictions. In Maricopa, the practical effect of Snow’s ruling is the continuation of oversight that the agency, the county’s elected leadership, and the federal government all now want to end. The judge is requiring more — because the constitutional violations haven’t stopped.
Snow’s opinion makes the finding explicit: “The record does not support a finding that, absent federal monitoring, Defendants are unlikely to resume the conduct that necessitated the Court’s injunctive Orders.” The judge is not relitigating whether the oversight was once warranted. He is finding that the office’s own record does not demonstrate it will sustain compliance without judicial supervision. The 1.5 million Latino residents of Maricopa County — whose Fourth Amendment and equal-protection rights are at stake — still have a judge watching. That is the system working.