July 28, 2010

Less than 24 hours before Arizona’s immigration law was set to go into effect and just a day after Fremont, Nebraska, voluntarily suspended its own troublesome immigration law, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton granted a temporary injunction to stop several major provisions of the Arizona law from doing any harm.
To receive the temporary injunction, the U.S. Department of Justice had to show the likelihood that it would win at trial, the likelihood of irreparable harm that would be caused without the injunction, and that the injunction would be equitable and in the public interest.
Although a final decision on its legality is still some time away, Judge Bolton’s ruling temporarily suspends SB 1070’s requirements that:

• local and state police must check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws

• immigrants must carry their papers at all times

• makes it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places

• police verify the immigration status of all arrested individuals before they can be released

and blocked the ability of police to execute warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.
Judge Bolton permitted SB 1070’s prohibition against local police from adopting policies that might limit federal immigration law enforcement (such as sanctuary laws) and the right for Arizonans to sue government agencies that adopt such policies to go into effect.
As it was enacted, SB 1070 would irreparably harm South Asians in Arizona through the increase of racial profiling by police and South Asian survivors of domestic violence, in particular, because of the decrease of services available to them (as SAALT has written about here).
To read SAALT’s statement on the Arizona law, click here.
To read more information about SAALT’s work on immigration and immigrant rights, click here.

Source: SAALT Blog