by Jeremy Leaming
Although the Supreme Court invalidated three key provisions of Arizona’s outlandishly harsh anti-immigrant law, it left in place for the moment the law’s ignoble “show me your papers” measure.
The majority in Arizona v. United States invalidated three provisions of the law, SB 1070, saying they could not be enforced because they co
nflicted with the federal government’s constitutional authority to set policy on immigration matters. Those provisions included Section 3 criminalizing the failure of persons to carry immigration documents; Section 6, barring undocumented immigrants from seeking work; and Section 6, allowing warrantless arrests when an officer has probable cause to believe a person who has committed a crime is undocumented.
Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority said the “national government has significant power to regulate immigration. With power comes responsibility, and the sound exercise of national power over immigration depends on the nation’s meetings its responsibility to base its laws on a political will informed by searching, thoughtful, rational civic discourse.”
But Section 2 (B), the “show me your papers” provision was upheld. The provision requires police to make a “reasonable attempt … to determine the immigration status” of persons stopped, arrested or detained on some other legitimate basis if “reasonable suspicion exists that the person” is “unlawfully present in the United States.”
Regardless of how that provision is interpreted, Kennedy said it “only requires state officers to conduct a status check during the course of an authorized, lawful detention or after a detainee has been released, the provision likely would survive preemption – at least absent some showing that it has other consequences that are adverse to federal law and its objectives.”
Kennedy, however, said Arizona’s “show me your papers” provision may yet be susceptible to preemption or constitutional challenges. He said today’s opinion “does not foreclose other preemption and constitutional challenges to the law as interpreted and applied after it goes into effect.”
where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, ‘it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.’”