Editorials
GUEST EDITORIAL
New York Times
Showdown in Arizona
Judge Blocks Much of State’s Noxious Immigration Law
The federal judge who ruled on Arizona’s tragic, noxious new immigration law on Wednesday did not stop all of it from taking effect today, but she preliminarily halted the worst of it. And although appeals are certain, Federal District Judge Susan Bolton offered clear and well-reasoned arguments affirming the federal government’s final authority over immigration enforcement. We hope this is the beginning of the end of the misbegotten Arizona rules and what they represent.
Judge Bolton explained basic points that those who support the Arizona law have ignored or forgotten:
- A state cannot require its police officers to demand the papers of people they stop and suspect are illegal immigrants.
As the judge wrote, the law places an “unacceptable burden on a lawfully present aliens.”
- Arizona cannot require that every arrested person have his or her immigration status checked, or that people be detained until they prove they are here lawfully.
- Arizona cannot make it a state crime for immigrants not to carry papers at all times, or for an undocumented immigrant to look for work.
- It cannot give officers the power to make warrantless arrests of anyone they believe has committed a crime that makes them deportable.
Deportation is a matter to be decided by a judge in court, Judge Bolton wrote, not a state trooper or sheriff’s deputy in a traffic stop.
Arizona’s law is not a case of a state helping the federal government do a job it neglected. It is a radical upending of immigration priorities, part of a spiteful crusade to force a mass exodus of illegal immigrants. Arizona still has a governor, legislators and law officers determined to pursue immigration enforcement at any cost. It has the country’s most prolific immigrant-hunting machinery, mostly because of the Maricopa County sheriff, who indiscriminately raids Latino neighborhoods. With demonstrators converging on the state this week, Arizona threatens to become a national fracturing point on immigration. The Obama administration can do more than just watch. It can reassert the importance of sensible national immigration policies.
The administration can start by rethinking two troubling programs (Secure Communities, which requires immigration checks for everyone booked into a jail, and 287(g), in which local law-enforcement officials are deputized as immigration agents in task forces and in jails).
The Obama administration has resisted calls to abolish the programs, despite warnings of racial profiling, arrests on pretexts and other abuses, but there is no excuse for not pulling the plug on Arizona’s 287(g) programs, the largest in the nation.
It should also listen to George Gascon, the police chief of San Francisco, who was at the center of the immigration-enforcement debate as the police chief in Mesa, Ariz. He believes public safety is jeopardized when officers waste time chasing low-priority targets, and people in immigrant areas fear law enforcement. He has suggested a pilot program in which Secure Communities would restrict focus to serious offenders. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should have no problem with that. It says its highest priority is removing “aliens who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety.”
Judge Bolton’s ruling reminded us all of the unacceptable price of the Arizona way: an incoherent immigration system, squandered law enforcement resources, diminished public safety, the awful sight of a nation of immigrants turning on itself. President Obama took a big risk when he filed suit against the Arizona law, and deserves credit for that. We hope he goes on to make clear to all the states that the Arizona way is not the American way.
