Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vince Warren issued the following statement in response to today’s Supreme Court ruling on Arizona‘s controversial SB1070 immigration law:
The Center for Constitutional Rights is relieved that the Supreme Court reached the right decision in affirming the Ninth Circuit’s invalidation of Sections 3, 5 and 6 of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB1070, which imposed state criminal penalties for immigration-related violations in blatant violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
But we are extremely disappointed that the Court has endorsed Arizona’s damaging policy of requiring police to stop and interrogate anyone they suspect to be present unlawfully. In upholding Section 2(B) of SB 1070, the Supreme Court has legitimized reactionary state law ordinances that encourage widespread racial profiling, multiply wrongful arrests, and spread fear in communities of color. Today’s decision allows individual states to create a patchwork system of immigration enforcement and in effect undoes decades of precedent holding that regulation of immigration is an exclusively federal function. The Supreme Court has sent the disheartening message that it is willing to turn back the clock to a “states’ rights” era in which the federal courts have no role in protecting the civil rights of people of color.
Angelica Salas, executive director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), a regional organization with national impact focused on immigrant and civil rights:
“Today’s ruling marks a dark day for justice in the history of the United States of America. In one sweep, the Supreme Court has sided with Arizona and allowed racial profiling as an acceptable law enforcement tool.
The history of our country is riddled with injustices made possible through an extreme minority’s justification of discriminatory, divisive, and callous decrees. The codification of segregation, exclusion from voting, Trail of Tears, encampment of ethnic minorities, and exile of whole class of workers, to give but a few examples, was made federal statute because the courts allowed it without remorse. On the same week that the US Congress finally apologized for approving the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which enshrined ethnicity and nationality discrimination into law, the highest court in the land has shamefully swerved to the edge of a similar abyss.
But our nation’s history is also one where people of good will stood up and pressed for change, making us a better people for it. Now, it is up to the immigrant community and its allies to change history.
Let there be no mistake about it. Just as the seeds of unfairness and bigotry beget blind passions; our right to protect our basic civil liberties should beget active civic engagement and massive community mobilization. No one legislative body should assume that today’s ruling will stand for long. The court challenges will continue as we are certain racial profiling is unconstitutional. We are on the right side of history and winning respect, dignity, and equal treatment under the law is a matter of “when” not “if”.
States like California can lead and go against the anti-immigrant tide by erecting firewalls to racial profiling, including legislative mandates, such as the TRUST Act (AB1081), that keep “Secure Communities” from snatching workers and families. The Obama Administration can also engage with those communities most likely to be impacted by today’s decision. The White House should: a) Send civil rights monitors to states that legalize discrimination and aggressively enforce civil rights laws across the country; b) Make good on the promise of prosecutorial discretion by providing real, fair, and consistent relief to families and workers threatened with separation; and, d) Stop “Secure Communities” the DHS program that encourages racial profiling and outsources federal enforcement priorities to local police; and, d) Work with Congress to permanently protect DREAMers, young people and students who are American in all but paperwork.”