In Trump they trust

SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO of Maricopa County, Arizona—a law-and-order populist who styles himself “America’s toughest sheriff”—sets much store by his gut. His gut tells him that his county, a sun-frazzled expanse of retirement villages and shopping centres around Phoenix, is safer when foreigners with no legal right to be in America are tracked down and locked up. That same instinct made the sheriff an early supporter of Donald Trump, lauding the New York businessman as he promised to build a border wall and deport an estimated 11m migrants in the country without the right papers. The ferocity of “Sheriff Joe”, a gruff, bearlike 84-year-old, could yet send him to jail: a federal judge recently recommended that he be prosecuted for defying court orders to cease patrols that target people by race.

So it was striking, this week, to find Mr Arpaio rather relaxed after several days in which Mr Trump seemed to hint that his immigration policies might be about to soften—even to the point of giving interviews saying that he will focus deportation efforts on “bad guys” and other foreigners with criminal records, while pondering a more leisurely approach for those who have lived blameless working lives for many years.