Expect Challenges to Arizona Immigration Law

(April 29) -- Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik knows his protests could get him taken to court, but he says he won't enforce Arizona's new law criminalizing illegal immigration anyway.

This week, Dupnik, the top law enforcement official in one of the state's largest counties, called the state's tough new law "racist," "disgusting" and "unnecessary." He said it would force police officers to use racial profiling, which is illegal in Arizona.

His defiant rhetoric was echoed among critics of the immigration law across the country, who vowed this week to challenge the controversial law in court.

Even the White House seems likely to enter the fray. The Obama administration may sue Arizona over the law as early as next month, according to The Washington Post.

White House officials told the Post that the administration could use the doctrine of "pre-emption" to make the case that the state law infringes on the federal government's enforcement of immigration. President Barack Obama has said that allowing the law to go into effect "carries a great amount of risk that core values that we all care about are breached."

The Arizona law makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. It also gives the police broad powers to stop anyone they believe, with "reasonable suspicion," to be undocumented. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill into law Friday.

Supporters of the legislation say Arizona was forced to act because the federal government had not stopped illegal immigration and drug-related crime at the border. Friday, Brewer said the law does not discriminate against Latinos. "Racial profiling is illegal," she said. "It is illegal in America, and it's certainly illegal in Arizona."

But Sheriff Dupnik says that's the problem. He told local Arizona news station KGUN9 that enforcing the law will by definition mean racial profiling, which he could also be sued for. "We're kind of in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation," he said. "It's just a stupid law."

Republican State Sen. Russell Pearce, who supports the law, disagreed. In an e-mail to KGUN9, Pearce wrote that "Illegal is not a race, it is a crime." He said Dupnik's stance is "the stupidest statement ... someone who takes an oath to enforce the law has ever made."

Rights groups like the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund argue that the law is unconstitutional, saying that it does discriminate against Latinos. They've promised to take the state to court.

Marielena Hincapie, director of the National Immigration Law Center, said it was only matter of time before the law ended up in court.

"The entire country has been galvanized," she told the Los Angeles Times. "People within the legal community are trying to figure out what we can do."

Attorney Peter Schey, who won a case against a 1994 California law that sought to deny services like education to illegal immigrants, says the Arizona law is likely to be overturned. The law is "doomed to the dustbin of other unconstitutional efforts by local government to regulate immigration, which is a uniquely federal function," he told the Los Angeles Times.

But other lawyers have said the law simply allows the state to enforce federal laws that are already on the books. Kris Kobach, for example, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who worked on immigration issues for the Bush administration, told The Associated Press that the law is entirely constitutional.