A Court Challenge to Arizona’s Immigration Law
20100518 22:45count on legal guild professionals to get it wrong.
Arizona, it appears, will have to defend its new immigration-enforcement law in federal court.
A coalition of interest groups, including the ACLU, has launched a legal challenge to Arizona’s new immigration law, arguing that it both invites racial profiling and is unconstitutional.
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The Friendly House complaint makes several charges.One is that immigration is the job of the federal government, and the federal government alone. SB1070 violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, the lawyers argue, by setting up a state-level immigration-law and enforcement regime, where immigration is a federal matter. Citizenship verification entails adherence to a complex set of federal statutes, the plaintiffs argue, and this is the federal government’s responsibility, not that of state law enforcers. So when an AZ law enforcer, for instance, is empowered to detain people for the purpose of verifying citizenship, that too is unconstitutional, the complaint argues. [...]