A man holed up in a Phoenix hotel was arrested and accused of threatening to bomb the courthouse where jurors were to begin deciding whether convicted murderer Jodi Arias should get the death penalty, authorities said Thursday.

The penalty phase of Arias' intensely watched trial had been scheduled to begin early Thursday afternoon in Superior Court in Phoenix before the same jurors who convicted her Wednesday of first-degree murder in the 2008 killing of Travis Alexander. But court authorities announced without explanation Thursday that the hearing had been postponed.

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Later in the day, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office said in a statement that its deputies had arrested an 18-year-old man who it said had posted threats on Twitter saying he had planted a bomb in the courtroom and planned to die in a shootout with police.

The man was identified as Laquint H. Cherry, described as "a local area resident." He was being held on a felony terrorism charge.

Cherry resisted officers' attempts to persuade him to surrender from his room in a hotel near Interstate 10 in Phoenix for several hours, all the while tweeting "threatening messages about not being taken alive" and warning that he would "kill the cops surrounding him," the statement said.

"Eventually, Cherry was arrested without incident," it said.

The Twitter account allegedly used by Cherry couldn't immediately be confirmed as authentic by NBC News, but it includes specific tweets cited in the sheriff's report.

Some of the tweets say its user is armed; speaking to reporters Thursday afternoon, Sheriff Joe Arpaio confirmed that "we found some ammunition in his room."

The sheriff's office suggested that the threatening messages were intended for Arpaio as much as for jurors, court officers and spectators in the courtroom. It noted that a new sheriff's headquarters under construction had received bomb threats, and it said "an actual bomb was mailed to the Sheriff, but was intercepted."

"Therefore, our awareness for these kinds of threats is heightened," it said.

The arrest adds another twist to the already bizarre tale of Arias' arrest and trial, adding the larger-than-life personality of the highly controversial Arpaio, 75, to the mix.

Full coverage of the Jodi Arias trial

Arpaio is nationally famous as "America's Toughest Sheriff" for his department's crackdowns on illegal immigration and treatment of inmates in the county's jails. The U.S. Justice Department has sued Arpaio, alleging racial profiling.

Arpaio also was a prominent advocate of investigating Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency, declaring a year ago that he believed that a birth certificate the White House released in 2011 was a forgery.

He survived a recall petition in 2007 and was re-elected last year with 52 percent of the vote.

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

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PHOENIX, Ariz. -- A deputy from a controversial Arizona sheriff's office countered accusations of racial profiling on Thursday, telling a court that he had risked his life to rescue a Latino illegal immigrant from armed kidnappers.

Carlos Rangel told a civil trial alleging Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his office engage in racially profiling Latinos that, at the behest of federal immigration police, he went undercover to play the role of the immigrant's relative to meet kidnappers, one of whom pointed a gun at him.

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The kidnappers were arrested and the immigrant was released.

Asked by defense lawyer Tom Liddy if he was an "anti-Hispanic bigot," Rangel answered: "No. I am not."

Arpaio, who styles himself "America's toughest sheriff," and his office are defendants in a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Phoenix that will test whether police can target illegal immigrants without racially profiling Hispanic citizens and legal residents.

The 80-year-old lawman testified this week he was against racial profiling and denied his office arrested people because of the color of their skin.

The case will serve as a precursor to a civil rights lawsuit filed by the federal government, which is much broader.

Feds sue Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, alleging racial profiling

The plaintiffs, a group of Latinos, say they were discriminated against during sweeps to flush out criminals and illegal immigrants in Maricopa County, which includes the metropolitan Phoenix area. During such sweeps, sheriff's deputies flood an area of a city — in some cases, heavily Latino areas — over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders.

'Dark-skinned people'
The group accused Arpaio of launching some sweeps based on emails and letters from residents who complained that "dark-skinned people" were congregating in a given area or speaking Spanish. The group says deputies in the sweeps pulled over Hispanics without probable cause, making the stops only to inquire about the immigration status of the people in the vehicles.

The sheriff has said that people are stopped only if authorities have probable cause to believe they have committed crimes and that deputies later find many are illegal immigrants.

Arpaio's office maintained that illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted since January 2008, according to figures provided by the sheriff's department, which hasn't conducted any such patrols since October.

The sheriff, who is seeking re-election to a sixth term in November, has been a lightning rod for controversy over his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in the state, as well as his investigation into the validity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Arizona was in the news last month when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a key element of the state's crackdown on illegal immigrants requiring police to investigate those they stop and suspect of being in the country illegally.

Arpaio faces a separate, broader lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department in May, alleging systematic profiling, sloppy and indifferent police work and a disregard for minority rights.

The civil lawsuit was lodged in the name of Manuel Ortega Melendres, one of five Hispanics who say they were stopped by deputies because they were Latino, which Arpaio denies. It was later opened to all Latino drivers stopped since 2007.

Arizona Sheriff Arpaio under scrutiny in racial profiling case

Melendres, a Mexican tourist on a valid visa in a truck was pulled over ostensibly because the white driver was speeding.

Rangel, who arrested Melendres, was asked by plaintiffs' counsel if he had questioned the driver. He told the court he had no grounds to investigate the driver.

When asked by Liddy if he had ever racially profiled anyone while working at the sheriff's office, Rangel, a 13-year veteran of the force, replied: "No".

In later testimony, a Hispanic woman who is a U.S. citizen told the court she was pulled over by a sheriff's deputy in 2009 on suspicion she had drugs, alcohol and weapons in her car as she drove home from studying at a Phoenix valley university.

Despite telling the deputy she was pregnant, Lorena Escamilla said, she was thrown roughly onto the back seat of his patrol car. A subsequent search of her car did not find any drugs. While she was cited for failure to produce identification and not having insurance, charges against her were dropped.

McJail? Sheriff's 'Tent City' gets McDonald's-like number 'served' sign

Escamilla said she later filed a charge of assault with Phoenix police department against the deputy and has since been fearful of being pulled over by the officer.

Also testifying was a Hispanic mother who was in a vehicle with a group of Boy Scouts that was pulled over in 2009 by a deputy for speeding while returning from the Grand Canyon.

Diona Solis, who is also a U.S. citizen, said the deputy was "rude" and "mocking" and unnecessarily requested identification from the boys in the car aged 8 to 11, among them her son.

"The boys were minors ... I thought it was unreasonable to ask them for IDs ... they hadn't done anything wrong," she said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

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A girl detained in a raid of a group of suspected illegal immigrants in Maricopa County, Ariz., last week is a 5-year-old who left El Salvador to try to reach relatives in California, NBC News has learned.

The girl was traveling with strangers as part of a smuggling group, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Agents say none of the 15 adults caught with her in a van knew who she was, or where her parents might be. 

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The group was arrested Friday night at an undisclosed location in northern Maricopa County.

"It was part of a human-smuggling investigation that we've been investigating throughout the Valley," sheriff’s spokesman Chris Hegstrom told azcentral.com.

The girl was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said it transferred her to the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The girl's first name is Rosa and she is now in the care of a faith-based social-service organization, Health and Human Services sources told NBC News on Thursday. 

Most of the other suspected illegal immigrants, who claimed to be from Mexico, were booked into jail, the Sheriff’s Office said. They were on their way to destinations in to New York, New Jersey, Kansas, Texas, California, Connecticut and Kentucky and told authorities they paid between $300 and $3,500 to be smuggled across the border, KPHO-TV reported.

"We enforce the human-smuggling laws here," said Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the no-nonsense lawman known for his get-tough efforts to combat illegal immigration. "Every chance I can get to take action on my own without turning them over to ICE, I do. Especially with the new policy the president has," he was quoted as saying by azcentral.com.

Three men in the arrested group were turned over to ICE and deported to Mexico, ICE officials in Arizona said.

It’s not uncommon for unaccompanied children to be found among groups of illegal aliens crossing the Arizona border from Mexico.

ICE officials in Phoenix said they referred have referred more than 1,600 unaccompanied alien juveniles to Health and Human Services this fiscal year for placement in juvenile shelters.

The arrests announced by Arpaio’s office came after President Barack Obama introduced a policy that halts the deportation of some young people brought to the United States illegally by their parents.

Under the new guidelines, illegal immigrants younger than age 30 can apply to stay provided they were younger than 16 when they arrived in the U.S., have lived here for at least five years and have no criminal record. They also must be students, a high-school graduate, have a GED diploma or have been honorably discharged from the military or Coast Guard.

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Updated 10:05 p.m. ET

PHOENIX -- Sheriff Joe Arpaio said a scathing U.S. Justice Department report about his office's law enforcement tactics against Latinos marks "a sad day for America as a whole."

Billed as America's toughest sheriff, Arpaio struck a defiant tone at a Thursday afternoon news conference in response to the report, which he called a politically motivated attack by the Obama administration that will make Arizona unsafe.

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"Don't come here and use me as the whipping boy for a national and international problem," he said.

The report released Thursday said that Arpaio's office carried out a blatant pattern of discrimination against Latinos.

(Read the full Department of Justice letter here.)

The report said Arpaio's office also held a "systematic disregard" for the Constitution amid a series of immigration crackdowns that have turned the lawman into a prominent national political figure. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday cut ties with the Maricopa County sheriff's office that allowed trained deputies to enforce immigration laws. Homeland Security also will restrict the sheriff's office use of the Secure Communities program, which uses fingerprints collected in local jails to identify illegal immigrants.

"Illegal criminal offenders will go undetected and be dumped back out on the street near you, and for that you can thank your federal government," Arpaio said.

But a senior Department of Homeland Security official maintains that any criminal offender found to be in the country illegally will still be detained, just not in the Maricopa County Jail. Instead, according to the official, those individuals will now be held in federal facilities, not released back into the public.

Arpaio faces a Jan. 4 deadline for saying whether he wants to work out an agreement with the Justice Department to make changes ending discrimination. If not, the federal government will sue him, possibly putting in jeopardy millions of dollars in federal funding for Maricopa County.

"We are going to cooperate the best we can. And if they are not happy, I guess they can carry out their threat and go to federal court," Arpaio said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Updated at 5 p.m. EST

The U.S. government said Thursday that the man who called himself the toughest sheriff in America ran an office that has committed wide-ranging civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged complaints.

The U.S. Justice Department's expert on measuring racial profiling called it the most egregious case he has seen, the department's civil rights division chief told reporters.

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The scathing report on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release, marks the federal government's harshest rebuke of a man who rose to national prominence for his immigration crackdowns. Republican presidential candidates have competed for his endorsement.

(Read the full Department of Justice letter here.)

Arpaio has long denied the racial profiling allegation. His office did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment.

After the report was released, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would cut ties with Arpaio.

Secretary Janet Napolitano, formerly Arizona's governor, said the department is ending an agreement with the Maricopa County sheriff's office that allowed trained deputies to enforce immigration laws. It's also restricting the office's use of the Secure Communities program, which uses fingerprints collected in local jails to identify illegal immigrants.

Arpaio, 79, has built his reputation on jailing inmates in tents and dressing them in pink underwear, selling himself to voters as unceasingly tough on crime and pushing the bounds of how far local police can go to confront illegal immigration.

Apart from the civil rights investigation, a federal grand jury has been investigating Arpaio's office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009. His department allegedly has misspent county money and failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sexual-abuse cases, many involving illegal immigrants, The New York Times reported.

The civil rights report will require Arpaio to set up effective policies against discrimination that a judge would monitor for compliance. Arpaio faces a Jan. 4 deadline for saying whether he wants to work out an agreement. If not, the federal government will sue him and let a judge decide the complaint.

In a press conference Thursday, Thomas Perez, the head of the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division, said the department's expert on measuring racial profiling called the case the most egregious case of racial profiling in the country that he has seen or reviewed in professional literature.

The civil rights report criticized the sheriff's office for launching immigration patrols, known as "sweeps," based on complaints that Latinos were merely gathering near a business without committing crimes.

The report said Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos. Deputies on the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good cause, the investigation found.

A review found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio's immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops — almost all involving Latino drivers — that were done without reasonable suspicion. The stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.

Latinos who were in the U.S. legally were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps, according to the report.

Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office.

The civil rights report also found that police supervisors often used county accounts to send emails that demeaned Latinos to colleagues. One email had a photo of a mock driver's license for a fictional state called "Mexifornia."

Federal investigators also focused heavily on the language barriers in Arpaio's jails.

Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day.

Detention officers refused to accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when the documents were completed in Spanish, and they pressured Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms that implicated their legal rights without language assistance.

Arpaio, one of Arizona's leading Republicans, recently endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry's bid for the GOP presidential nomination.

"I don't know what all the details are, but I do know this, that nothing surprises me out of this administration," Perry said Thursday on Fox News. "This administration oversaw "Fast and Furious," a sting operation in which illegally obtained weapons were allowed across the border into Mexico in an effort to find drug cartel leaders.

"I would suggest to you that these people are out after Sheriff Joe," Perry said. "He is tough. And again, when I'm the president of the United States you're not going to see me going out after states like Arizona or Alabama suing sovereign states for making decisions particularly because the federal government has been abject failure at securing the border.

Rey Torres, president of the Arizona Latino Republican Association, told msnbc.com that his group declared a “vehement rejection of everything” in the Justice Department report.

He called Arpaio a needed “soldier in the fight to keep Arizona citizens safe from violence perpetrated along immigration corridors due to the federal government’s unwillingness to enforce immigration law in this region or any others.”

“It would be more interesting if [U.S. Attorney General Eric] Holder held himself up to the same legal scrutiny and once and for all revealed who is responsible for “Fast and Furious” rather than push these trumped up charges of racial profiling that distract from the issue.

The Arizona Democratic Party on Thursday, said, "It's hard to imagine a public official who more embodies corruption, waste and arrogance than Sheriff Joe Arpaio. We welcome the Justice Department's full attention to this case and hope it helps mainstream Arizona move on from Arpaio's extremism and embrace a new era of responsible leadership."

The Associated Press and msnbc.com's Jim Gold contributed to this report.

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EL MIRAGE, Ariz. -- The 13-year-old girl opened the door of her home in this small city on the edge of Phoenix to encounter a man who said that his car had broken down and he needed to use the phone. Once inside, the man pummeled the teen from behind, knocking her unconscious and sexually assaulting her.

Seven months before, in an apartment two miles away, another 13-year-old girl was fondled in the middle of the night by her mother's live-in boyfriend. She woke up in her room at least twice a week to find him standing over her, claiming to be looking for her mother's cell phone.

Both cases were among more than 400 sex-crimes reported to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office during a three-year period ending in 2007 — including dozens of alleged child molestations — that were inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all, according to current and former police officers familiar with the cases.

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In El Mirage alone, where Arpaio's office was providing contract police services, officials discovered at least 32 reported child molestations — with victims as young as 2 years old — where the sheriff's office failed to follow through, even though suspects were known in all but six cases.

Many of the victims, said a retired El Mirage police official who reviewed the files, were children of illegal immigrants.

The botched sex-crimes investigations have served as an embarrassment to a department whose sheriff is the self-described "America's Toughest Sheriff" and a national hero to conservatives on the immigration issue.

Arpaio's office refused several requests over a period of months to answer questions about the investigations and declined a public records request for an internal affairs report, citing potential disciplinary actions.

Brian Sands, a top sheriff's official who is in charge of the potential discipline of any responsible employees, was later made available to talk about the cases. He declined to say why they weren't investigated. "There are policy violations that have occurred here," Sands said. "It's obvious, but I can't comment on who or what."

Sands said officers had subsequently moved to clear up inadequately investigated sex-crimes in El Mirage and elsewhere in the county. He said leads were worked if they existed and cases were closed if there was no further evidence to pursue.

Arpaio's office was under contract to provide police services in El Mirage as the city struggled with its then dysfunctional department. After the contract ended and El Mirage was re-establishing its own police operation, the city spent a year sifting through layers of disturbingly incomplete casework.

El Mirage Detective Jerry Laird, who reviewed some the investigations, learned from a sheriff's summary of 50 to 75 cases files he picked up from Arpaio's office that an overwhelming majority of them hadn't been worked.

That meant there were no follow-up reports, no collection of additional forensic evidence and zero effort made after the initial report of the crime was taken.

"I think that at some point prior to the contract (for police services) running out, they put their feet on the desk, and that was that," Laird said.

Arpaio acknowledged his office had completed an internal probe into the inadequate investigations, but said, "I don't think it's right to get into it until we get to the bottom of this and see if there's disciplinary action against any employees."

A small number of cases from El Mirage were handed over to prosecutors, but the El Mirage Police Department said most were no longer viable — evidence dating as far back as 2006 had grown cold or wasn't collected in the first place, victims had either moved away or otherwise moved on.

Bill Louis, then-assistant El Mirage police chief who reviewed the files after the sheriff's contract ended, believes the decision to ignore the cases was made deliberately by supervisors in Arpaio's office — and not by individual investigators.

"I know the investigators. I just cannot believe they would wholesale discount these cases. No way," Louis said. "The direction had to come (from) up the food chain."

Louis said he believes whoever made the decision knew that illegal immigrants — who are often transient and fear the police — were unlikely to complain about the quality of investigations. He said some cases also involved families here legally.

El Mirage paid the sheriff's office $2.7 million for a wide range of police protection from 2005 through mid-October 2007, after the city's police department had been criticized in an audit as poorly organized, loosely supervised and mismanaged.

Although a small number of El Mirage officers continued working there during the period, Arpaio brought in patrol officers and detectives and managers who ran the department.

El Mirage police files obtained by The Associated Press through public records requests establish a pattern of sex-crimes not actually being investigated after the crimes were reported to Arpaio's office.

In April 2007, a 3-year-old girl was reported molested by her father, an illegal immigrant who cared for the child while her mother was at work. When the mother confronted her husband about the abuse, he cried and swore he'd never do it again.

Yet a few days later, the mother noticed more signs of sexual abuse on her daughter and called for help. After the initial report, that help didn't come.

The string of unresolved cases left Elizabeth Ditlevson, deputy director for the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence, shaking her head. "My impressions were anger at the system and concern for the people whose cases weren't addressed," she said.

According to both Sands and Scott Freeman, a sheriff's official who heard complaints from then-El Mirage Police Chief Mike Frazier about the quality of the sex-crimes investigations, more than 400 cases countywide had to be reopened. Freeman told outside investigators examining alleged managerial misconduct at Arpaio's office that a number of arrests were made in the reopened cases.
The April 2011 report on alleged managerial misconduct said the sheriff's internal effort to determine what had gone wrong with the sex-crimes investigations was twice derailed.

One delay occurred when the male sheriff's official leading the inquiry was accused of sexual harassment — this by a female supervisor whose portfolio included some of the mishandled cases, according to the report.

Another internal affairs investigation, launched in May 2008, was stopped after the investigator was pulled away at the direction of David Hendershott, then the top aide to Arpaio, to help with another matter. The internal probe was reopened in December 2010 while Hendershott was on medical leave, according to the 2011 summary.

Hendershott's account conflicted with others.

Hendershott, who has since resigned amid separate misconduct allegations and declined a request by the AP to comment, told investigators the internal affairs inquiry was still in progress when he went on medical leave in 2010.

Still, Hendershott told investigators that the El Mirage Police Department had good reason to be upset about the sex-crimes handled by the sheriff's office.

The report of the 13-year-old who had been inappropriately touched by her mother's live-in boyfriend had been faxed to one of Arpaio's investigators. El Mirage police, who were given back the case about 11 months later, learned that it hadn't been worked.

When El Mirage police finally tracked down the mother, she said her boyfriend had moved out and that she no longer had contact with him. She and her daughter were in counseling and didn't want to bring the case to court.

In their follow-up on the case of the 13-year-old attacked by the man claiming to have a broken car, El Mirage police discovered Arpaio's office hadn't interviewed the victim.

An El Mirage detective went to the girl's home just off the city's main drag. The girl's uncle said she and her mother weren't around and took the investigator's card with a promise to ask them to call.

The mother never called back. She and her daughter's whereabouts are unknown.

The case of the molested 3-year-old was returned to El Mirage police unworked five months after the initial report. The family's beige tract home was deserted, the phone disconnected.