The Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Arizona versus United States threw out key elements of Arizona’s anti-immigrant statute, but in fact the ruling allowed the police to investigate the immigration status of all individuals for having “reasonable suspicion”.
What is “reasonable suspicion”? Is it something based on accent, race, religion, or looks?
Isabel Garcia from the organization “Coalicion por los Derechos Humanos” in Arizona said that when she heard the Supreme Court decision upholding the “reasonable suspicion” provisions of Arizona’s Law SB-1070, she saw the Arizonification of the United States as a whole.
“We’ve been fighting local “reasonable suspicion” laws here in Arizona for decades,” said Garcia whose organization is dedicated to defending immigrants and documenting immigrant deaths in the desert.
She added: “Here “reasonable suspicion” has proven a very weak and vague legal term that is responsible for lots of family separations, enormous suffering and even death. Now, it is going to also haunt those of you in the rest of the country.”
President Obama’s allies in the immigrant rights movement view the Supreme Court decision to strike down three of the four provisions of SB-1070 as a reason to rally voters in the 2012 presidential race, wrote Roberto Lovato in an article for The Nation.
Garcia and many immigration activists throughout the country view the Court’s decision as a threat to the civil liberties of immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
“The Supreme Court is making it possible for hundreds of thousands of police officers throughout the country to racially profile millions of people,” she stated.
“We have not seen the potential for this scale of racial profiling and discrimination since the Jim Crow law in the South against black slaves.”
Also lost in the reporting on the Supreme Court decision, says Garcia, is any sense of what she and others consider the central political fact about Arizona’s racial profiling law: both Democrats and Republicans, made the “papers, please” provisions of SB-1070 possible.
Prior to Arizona’s passage of SB-1070, the Obama administration continued and expanded George W. Bush immigration policies era that were the most massive racial profiling programs to date.
Known respectively as “287g” and “Secure Communities”, these controversial federal programs force local law enforcement agencies to collaborate with federal immigration officials.
Now federal provisions expanding “Secure Communities” into every jurisdiction in the country by 2013 mean that every local police in the nation has or will become a de facto immigration officer.
The American Civil Liberties Union and others have documented widespread SB 1070-like racial profiling by Border Patrol agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and other federal authorities.
Garcia and “Derechos Humanos” who have carry out a decade long fight against the “reasonable suspicion” component of Arizona law has yielded similar findings, and similar stories with very grave consequences.
“I fear that the Supreme Court has just made it easier for people across the country to suffer, or even die. This is why we must continue to fight and defeat this racist law” said Garcia.
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) said: “If its at the discretion of a police officer, clearly someone who has brown skin and an accent is more at a disadvantage than a blond person with white skin”.
Irma Rivera, spokesperson for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM), agrees. “The impact of this decision will be an upsurge of racial profiling on a massive scale.”
Brandeis School of Law professor and immigration expert Enid Trucios-Haynes also worries the current “papers please” law may lead to more racial profiling.
“Reasonable suspicion”, particularly in a country with the racial history of the United States, will inevitably mean that people of colour will be subject to investigation, and that white authorities will certainly find any number of reasons to be suspicious as to the status of someone taken into custody, or stopped for some other matter”, writes Bill Fletcher, Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies.
By Silvio Gonzalez via PL