In 2007, a traffic stop in Cave Creek, Arizona, set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately redefine the balance of power between local voters and the federal judiciary in the Grand Canyon State.
Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a legal visitor to the United States with a valid visa, was wrongly arrested by officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office even after he had provided identification, while the speeding driver, a Caucasian male, was not taken into custody.[1] That disparity became the foundation of litigation that would ultimately subject the Sheriff’s Office to sweeping federal oversight. Melendres and others sued then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Sheriff’s Office, alleging racial profiling. Federal courts ultimately agreed, ruling that the agency’s practices violated the U.S. Constitution.
Nearly two decades and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars later, the case remains active—no longer simply a lawsuit about past misconduct, but an ongoing federal intervention into who really controls the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office: the people of Maricopa County or a federal judge.
The case of Melendres v. Arpaio ballooned into protracted class-action litigation,[2] involving at least five separate trips to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,[3] multiple findings of contempt,[4] numerous injunctions and other court orders,[5] and a docket[6] that now lists over 3,300 documents filed with the court. More than 150 attorneys have participated in the case (so far). What was designed as a remedy for constitutional violations has evolved into a long-running oversight regime—one that now operates largely beyond public view at the cost of millions to taxpayers.
In 2013, federal judge G. Murray Snow issued an order placing the Sheriff’s Office under supervision by a court-appointed monitor.[7] After the parties could not agree on which of six possible monitors should take over, Judge Snow chose Robert Warshaw, of Warshaw and Associates, Inc.—a North Carolina-based firm that has overseen police agencies on behalf of courts in many other communities—as the monitor.[8] With that appointment, temporary judicial oversight hardened into long-term administrative control.
Since 2014, Warshaw has cost county taxpayers millions. Despite voters changing leadership and departmental reforms, Warshaw’s oversight persists, draining public resources with little transparency or accountability. In 2023, for example, Maricopa County paid Warshaw approximately $2.5 million—more than $200,000 per month—an astonishing sum for ambiguous line items such as “invoice preparation,” “telephone conferences,” and “office management.”[9] Overall, the monitor has collected more than $30 million in taxpayer dollars to fund his activities, without the public receiving a detailed breakdown of how that money was spent.[10]
These are not abstract figures; they represent real dollars diverted from critical public safety needs, such as hiring officers, upgrading equipment, or addressing rising crime rates. In effect, the monitor has evolved from a temporary safeguard into a standing budgetary obligation. Worse, these costs come with minimal oversight or public scrutiny. Standing court orders seal Warshaw’s invoices, shielding them from public scrutiny.[11]
This arrangement amounts to a federal surcharge on Maricopa County—an almost-blank check written by Arizona taxpayers to an unelected, absentee bureaucrat, plus other compliance costs.[12] What began as judicial correction over civil rights violations now resembles permanent external management with runaway spending and a local population who’s been left completely in the dark.
Distant Oversight Without Transparency
The imposition of the monitor over the county’s objections, including the obligation to pay for the monitor’s operations and expenses, has created a series of problems for the taxpaying public.[13] At its core, the ruling represents a structural reordering of authority: an unelected official, operating from outside Arizona, now exercises sweeping control over one of the state’s largest law-enforcement agencies. What is presented as judicial remediation has slowly transformed into a displacement of local sovereignty.
A deeper concern, however, lies in how Maricopa County’s absentee federal monitor spends local taxpayer money. The court has never required a detailed public accounting of the monitor’s budget. As a result, Maricopa County residents are forced to bankroll a long-running federal oversight operation without access to the kind of financial disclosure that would normally accompany any major public expenditure.
Federal supervision has also effectively sidelined local oversight. Instead of answering to Maricopa County voters or elected officials, the agency answers to a single authority—the federal monitor. The principle at stake is fundamental to our rights as citizens: If you spend public money, you owe the public an explanation. That is how self-government works. Accountability cannot be strengthened by creating an oversight regime that itself operates beyond public view.
Transparency Concerns
Unlike the Sheriff’s Office, the courts, and most other government entities, the court-appointed monitor wields extraordinary supervisory authority without being subject to ordinary public-records or transparency requirements. Taxpayers cannot meaningfully review how their money is spent. Instead, they are left watching from the sidelines as decisions are made behind closed doors.
These transparency concerns surfaced almost immediately after the monitor’s appointment. In May 2014, the federal judge held a hearing over a billing dispute between the monitor and the county. Afterward, Judge Snow ordered the monitor to release only “publicly available bills” with a “narrative description” of monitoring activities.[14] By contrast, “more detailed time entries for all of his team’s activities,” including “specific task-oriented time logs” and “backup for support costs consistent with generally accepted accounting standards,” would be submitted “to the Court alone.”[15]
Under that framework, itemized time sheets, task-specific entries and supporting cost documentation were kept from the public. Access was restricted to the court, the monitor, and a small number of county officials bound by strict nondisclosure requirements that prevented them from sharing information with “any person or entity.”[16]
These narrow exceptions to secrecy were established to give a veneer of democratic accountability, allowing the county to review the invoices, make payments, and promptly bring any disputed charges to the judge.[17] But even those disputes were to be kept under a strict rule of confidentiality. None could be publicly filed without the consent of the monitor, the defendants, and the plaintiffs.[18] None could be brought to the attention of the media or the taxpaying public.
The court defended the restrictions by arguing that, during reform efforts, the monitor or the sheriff “might have an interest in investigating something that comes up that they want to keep confidential for purposes of the investigation,” which “requires confidentiality.”[19]
In ordinary government practices, confidentiality is narrowly tailored, time-limited, and subject to eventual disclosure. The monitoring regime imposed on Maricopa County residents departs sharply from that norm. Instead, the monitoring regime has operated under a broad and continuing veil of secrecy for more than a decade. Taxpayers are told to cut the checks and not ask questions.
A more balanced framework would limit confidentiality to specific, case-by-case circumstances and provide for disclosure once investigations conclude, with redactions where necessary. Safeguards like these, which are commonplace where government agencies must keep some information secret, would allow the public to see how its money is being spent and whether the monitor’s team is exercising fiscal discipline to protect the taxpayers of Maricopa County.
The Goldwater Institute made several attempts in 2024 and 2025 to gain access to the monitor’s itemized invoices by submitting public records requests to the sheriff’s office, the Maricopa County Budget Office, and the monitor himself. Due to the court’s orders,[20] however, only the vague, publicly available versions of the invoices were provided by the county.[21] Meanwhile, the monitor ignored the requests.
The publicly available invoices illustrate the problem. They reflect a bureaucratic structure that exercises expansive authority while exhibiting little regard for the fiscal transparency taxpayers deserve. The March 2024 invoice, for example, reports 676.6 aggregated hours devoted to a broad, but not exhaustive, category of “Professional Services” at a rate of $300 per hour, amounting to $202,990 for the month. Yet, the public has no way to determine how that time was divided or what “services” were provided. An additional fee of $2,000 was added for unspecified “Administrative/Financial Services Expenses.” The only itemized charges were $58.64 for postage, and $531.68 for office supplies—a shredder.[22] Taxpayers can see the price tag. They cannot see the work behind it.
In almost any other governmental context, invoices payable with tax dollars would be itemized and readily available for public inspection. That is standard practice under state or federal transparency laws.[23] Yet, the orders in the Melendres case invert what is typically expected, shielding ordinary information that would otherwise be made routinely available to the public and leaving the monitor’s taxpayer-funded activities and expenditures a mystery.[24]
Independent reporting has raised further questions. In 2023, a media investigation revealed that the monitor took a three-year hiatus from in-state visits citing the COVID pandemic.[25] During that period, the county continued paying nearly $100,000 a year to lease a building in downtown Phoenix for the monitor—space that mostly sat vacant.[26]
Free people have the right to transparency from their officials, elected and otherwise. That is an essential aspect of American democracy. In 2003, the Arizona Supreme Court said that “public access to court records helps further the democratic value of having knowledgeable and informed citizens and is thus instrumental to a state founded on principles of self-governance.”[27] Continued secrecy about the management of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office—one of the country’s largest sheriff’s offices, with more than 3,000 employees and an annual budget in excess of $500 million—makes it impossible for voters in Arizona’s most populous county to exercise democratic oversight over how their money is spent.
Federalism and Separation of Powers Concerns
The present arrangement in Maricopa County raises serious constitutional concerns. Local law enforcement authority belongs to the people of the state, exercised through their elected officials. Yet in this case, meaningful supervision has shifted to the federal judiciary.
The Constitution does not give the federal government general police powers.[28] Those belong to the states. While federal courts can remedy constitutional violations, they are not granted authority to permanently manage local law-enforcement agencies. Although courts do have the power and responsibility to resolve constitutional disputes and impose remedies to the violation of constitutional rights, when oversight becomes ongoing, the boundaries of federalism between state and federal power grow blurred. That is why the U.S. Supreme Court has held that such remedies must be imposed with “respect for the integrity and function of local government institutions.”[29]
In Maricopa County, federal oversight has evolved into something resembling de facto taxation by the judiciary. The court continues to require the county and its taxpayers to spend tens of millions of dollars on the monitor and compliance efforts while withholding detailed information about how that money is used.
Taxpayers deserve more than a bill. They are entitled to transparency. Self-government demands that the people be allowed to make key decisions at election time with the full knowledge of how their money is being spent. When a decades-long litigation regime continues to impose financial obligations long after meaningful reforms have addressed the specific constitutional violations at issue, voters risk being sidelined from the very governance they fund. The cure should not become the disease.
Potential Policy Solutions
There are several things policymakers and courts can and should do to ensure that future cases involving constitutional violations by law enforcement or other government entities don’t result in the same types of transparency and management concerns raised by the Melendres litigation.
First, statutes and rules related to court-appointed monitors can be tightened to ensure that the public receives a more detailed accounting of a monitor’s activities and expenditures. This could include amendments to specific existing statutory provisions such as 34 U.S.C. § 12601, to clarify the remedial powers of courts by defining terms like “appropriate equitable and declaratory relief.” It could also involve new legislation reining in the judiciary’s authority to impose indefinite monitoring on state and local entities, such as by limiting how long a monitor can be imposed without input from local voters.[30] And it could involve judicial rules and procedures increasing the number of judges who must sign off on long-term monitoring activities, or allowing for expedited appellate review, so that power is not concentrated in a single judge’s hands.
Second, the federal judiciary could adopt more formal rules regarding public access to judicial records, similar to the framework adopted by the Arizona Supreme Court.[31] Any such effort should include language that allows for document-by-document and line-by-line redactions[32] when nondisclosure is necessary to serve a compelling government interest, but which prohibits or significantly limits the use of blanket orders that completely seal off entire categories of documents.[33] And the burden of proof for any withholding decision, including the duration of such withholding, should always rest on the government, or on the party seeking to prevent disclosure, rather than the general public or those seeking transparency.[34] Once an investigation concludes, or once ongoing investigatory concerns are addressed, the release of records should be presumptive.
Third, law enforcement officials across the country can preemptively implement policies, training, and procedures to ensure that federal intervention in state and local operations is genuinely unnecessary.
Conclusion
For our system of self-government to work as designed, taxpayers must know how their money is being spent on basic government functions such as law enforcement. While certain information might need to be temporarily withheld to protect public safety, those instances should be well-defined, narrow in scope, and no longer than truly necessary to protect substantial government interests.
When it comes to federal-court-appointed monitors, the risk of violating those principles is especially serious. Additional guardrails are necessary to ensure that Maricopa County’s experience with the Melendres case does not become a recurring story throughout the country.
Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Voters must have access to enough information to hold public officials accountable. And all citizens should benefit from the structural protections of our federalist system of government.
APPENDIX
Endnotes
[1] News & Commentary: Manuel Ortega Melendres Bio, ACLU.org, https://www.aclu.org/bio/manuel-ortega-melendres.
[2] See Melendres v. Arpaio (Melendres I), 695 F.3d 990, 995 (9th Cir. 2012).
[3] Id.; Melendres v. Arpaio (Melendres II), 784 F.3d 1254 (9th Cir. 2015); Melendres v. Maricopa Cnty. (Melendres III), 815 F.3d 645 (9th Cir. 2016); Melendres v. Maricopa Cnty. (Melendres IV), 897 F.3d 1217 (9th Cir. 2018); Melendres v. Skinner (Melendres V), 113 F.4th 1126 (9th Cir. 2024).
[4] See Melendres V, 113 F.4th at 1129–31.
[5] The District Court issued its Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law on May 24, 2013 (Court Docket Entry (“Doc.”) 579), a Supplemental Permanent Injunction/Judgment Order on October 2, 2013 (Doc. 606), a Second Amended Second Supplemental Permanent Injunction/Judgement Order on July 26, 2016 (Doc. 1765), an Amended Third Supplemental Permanent Injunction/Judgment Order on Nov. 30, 2022 (Doc. 2830), and an Amended Fourth Amended Supplemental Permanent Injunction/Judgment Order on Sept. 4, 2024 (Doc. 3076), among other decisions.
[6] Melendres v. Sheridan, Case No. 2:07-cv-02513 (D.Ariz.).
[7] Id., Doc. No. 606 (Oct. 2, 2013).
[8] Id., Doc. No. 649 (Jan. 17, 2014).
[9] The publicly available invoices for 2022, 2023, and 2024 are included in the Appendix.
[10] See, e.g., Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. 3286-1 (Oct. 23, 2025); Maricopa County Files Motion to End Federal Oversight of MCSO, Maricopa County (Dec. 18, 2025), https://mcid.maricopa.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/3550.
[11] E.g., Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. No. 696.
[12] Estimates differ on the total cost of compliance with the court’s orders paid by taxpayers, but they range from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Compare Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. 3263 (Oct. 8, 2025) (over $60 million over ten years in non-legal and non-monitor costs), with Maricopa County Files Motion to End Federal Oversight of MCSO, Maricopa County (Dec. 18, 2025), https://mcid.maricopa.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/3550 (estimating more than $300 million spent in total compliance costs).
[13] The County had agreed to other remedial efforts as part of a consent decree (Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. 592), but did not agree to a monitor. See id., Doc. 606 at 2.
[14] Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. No. 696 at 1.
[15] Id. (emphasis added).
[16] Id. at 2 (emphasis added).
[17] Id.
[18] Id. at 3.
[19] Melendres v. Sheridan, supra, Doc. 700 (May 14, 2014) at 18.
[20] The original confidentiality order was referenced again in a subsequent order regarding another billing dispute (id., Doc. 741), temporarily suspended when questions as to the county’s status in the case arose (id., Doc. 1048), and altered by the court when additional details emerged (id., Doc. 1147). But the restrictions placed on those with access to the itemized invoices have remained in place for nearly twelve years, despite many changed circumstances since the outset of the monitor’s activities.
[21] See Appendix.
[22] Invoices for months in which the monitor conducted on-site visits contain slightly more detail regarding travel expenses, but nothing further regarding how the even larger amounts of time and money were spent. See Appendix at [April 2024 invoice]. Each site visit cost taxpayers approximately $100,000. See id.
[23] See, e.g., Carlson v. Pima Cnty., 687 P.2d 1242, 1245 (Ariz. 1984) (“records reasonably necessary to provide knowledge of all activities they undertake in the furtherance of their duties” are public records); Mathews v. Pyle, 251 P.2d 893, 895 (Ariz. 1952) (“A public record … is one made by a public officer in pursuance of a duty, the immediate purpose of which is to … serve as a memorial of official transactions for public reference.” (citation omitted)); Nixon v. Warner Commc’ns, Inc., 435 U.S. 589, 597 (1978) (recognizing common-law right to inspect and copy judicial records and documents); NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214, 242 (1978) (purpose of the federal Freedom of Information Act is to foster “an informed citizenry, [which is] vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.”).
[24] The Goldwater Institute has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Melendres supporting the county’s effort to end the monitoring entirely, which would return oversight of the Sheriff’s Office to the taxpaying public and halt these secretive billing practices. (Doc. 3378). We are hopeful that relief will ultimately be granted and that taxpayers will once again know how their money is being spent in furtherance of public safety, law enforcement, and constitutional compliance.
[25] Federal Monitor Overseeing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Hasn’t Been to Phoenix Since 2020, Arizona’s Family (Sept. 26, 2023), https://www.azfamily.com/2023/09/27/mcso-paying-office-space-federal-monitor-who-hasnt-been-arizona-since-2020/.
[26] See id.
[27] London v. Broderick, 80 P.3d 769, 772 ¶ 8 (Ariz. 2003).
[28] United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 566 (1995).
[29] Missouri v. Jenkins, 495 U.S. 33, 51 (1990).
[30] For example, monitoring could terminate automatically upon the completion of the offending elected official’s term in office and a fresh chance given to his or her successor.
[31] See Arizona Supreme Court Rule 123.
[32] The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure contemplate both redactions and filings made under seal without redaction. FRCP 5.2. That rule could be amended to specify that redactions are generally preferable to complete nondisclosure.
[33] See, e.g., Ariz. Supr. Ct. R. 123(c)(2)(C) (redactions required “unless release of the entire record is prohibited by law”); Carlson, 687 P.2d at 1246 (redaction is a “practical alternative to the complete denial of access”); I F G Port Holdings, L.L.C. v. Lake Charles Harbor & Terminal Dist., 82 F.4th 402, 410 (5th Cir. 2023) (“line-by-line” justification required for all material filed under seal).
[34] See, e.g., Carlson, supra; Mitchell v. Superior Ct., 690 P.2d 51, 54 (Ariz. 1984).
