The hammer has fallen. From the Washington Post:

A scathing U.S. Justice Department report released Thursday found that Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office carried out a blatant pattern of discrimination against Latinos and held a “systematic disregard” for the Constitution amid a series of immigration crackdowns that have turned the lawman into a prominent national political figure.

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The government found that Arpaio’s office committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including unjust immigration patrols and jail policies that deprive prisoners of basic Constitutional rights.

The Justice Department’s expert on measuring racial profiling found the sheriff’s office to be the most egregious case of profiling in the nation that he has seen or reviewed in professional literature, said Thomas Perez, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

“We found discriminatory policing that was deeply rooted in the culture of the department, a culture that breeds a systematic disregard for basic constitutional protections,” Perez said.

In response to the report, the Department of Homeland Security announced that would sever ties with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and that Arpaio's jail officials will lose their federal authority to check the immigration status of inmates in county jails.

From the Washington Post:

Economist Giovanni Peri has found that an influx of immigrants doesn’t increase the poverty rate by depressing the wages of low-income, native-born Americans and can actually decrease poverty when higher-skilled immigrants enter the workforce.

Peri, a professor at the University of California-Davis, looked at the economic impact of immigration in the United States on wages, then examined whether there was any correlation with the rise in U.S. poverty from 2000-2009. Here are his findings in a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research:

There is essentially no effect of immigration on native poverty at the national level. At the local level, only considering the most extreme estimates and only in some localities, we find non-trivial effects of immigration on poverty. In general, however, even the local effects of immigration bear very little correlation with the observed changes in poverty rates and they explain a negligible fraction of them.

Things are just getting worse for the GOP based on the latest polling data. President Obama has not exactly won over Hispanics, but he's in pretty good shape because of the overwhelming dread Hispanic voters feel when it comes to Republicans. NPR reports on the new poll:

The survey of 500 Latino registered voters found that Hispanics continue to lean toward President Obama and other Democratic candidates, and that they feel alienated by Republicans because of their general support for tougher immigration enforcement instead of a path to legal status.

Forty-six percent of Latino voters said Republicans "don't care too much" about Hispanics, and another 27 percent said they "are being hostile," the poll found.

And if Rubio received his party's vice presidential nomination, only 13 percent of Latinos said they would be "much more likely" to vote Republican. Eleven percent said they would be "somewhat more likely" to vote Republican. And 46 percent said it would "have no effect" on their decision.

The poll is still showing the President getting support, but it's soft and he has not sealed the deal. Hispanic voters could still simply stay home on election day.