President Biden’s re-election campaign launched a quick response digital ad Friday that shows former President Trump kissing former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on stage.
The kiss happened at a rally on Thursday, where the former president brought 91-year-old Arpaio to the stage, hugged him and blew an air kiss near the former police officer’s right ear.
“I don’t kiss men, but I kissed him,” Trump told the crowd at Dream City Church in Phoenix, a church that upholds marriage as “between a man and a woman.”
Biden’s new ad ends with Trump’s comments about the kiss, leading up to that moment with news coverage of Arpaio’s most controversial actions as sheriff in a 30-second supercut sharing a split screen with a loop of the kiss on stage.
The digital ad was created to target Latino voters in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Arpaio gained notoriety as the bogeyman of immigrant communities with aggressive immigration enforcement policies that included the construction of an open-air prison “tent city” that the sheriff himself compared to a “concentration camp” in 2008.
In 2011, the Department of Justice (DOJ) concluded that Arpaio engaged in the worst pattern of racial profiling by law enforcement in U.S. history.
That determination was based on a series of police actions in Maricopa County, from deputies stopping cars operated by Latinos at a much higher rate to prison guards refusing to accept requests written by inmates in Spanish.
The DOJ report was presented by then-Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Tom Perez, now a senior adviser to Biden.
In 2012, the DOJ filed suit against Arpaio “to end discriminatory and unconstitutional law enforcement practices” after he failed to comply with the report’s recommendations.
Trump finally pardoned him in 2017 for the charges.
The two are aligned in their approach to immigration enforcement, but also in their quest to prove that former President Obama was not born in Hawaii.
In 2011, Trump began questioning Obama’s birthplace in television interviews, promoting a false claim that Arpaio had defended for years, including publicly claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was fake.
While Arpaio is popular among Trump’s base, the Biden campaign has sought to highlight the ongoing relationship between Trump and the former sheriff, who is deeply unpopular among Latinos.
Trump will be in Las Vegas on Sunday, launching “Latinos for Trump,” his campaign’s rebranded Hispanic outreach effort.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
