after finding this I listen to a few more AZ immigration idiots audios and I am scared at how stupid really are and have no understanding of the law at all.Originally Posted by Knappster
after finding this I listen to a few more AZ immigration idiots audios and I am scared at how stupid really are and have no understanding of the law at all.
Most of the people who are against the law have not even read the law, if they would take the time to read it they would realize that there will be not more racial profiling then there currently is.
If there are bad cops out there that will use this law to allow him/her to racially profile subjects you can bet they are doing it already, the new law will not change a good cop into a bad cop.
Obama Administration Will Challenge Ariz.'s Law
Gov. Brewer said she's angry over comments by Clinton
POSTED: 10:37 am MST June 18, 2010
PHOENIX -- CBS News is reporting that a senior administration official has said the federal government will indeed formally challenge Arizona's immigration law when Justice Department lawyers are finished building the case.
Gov. Jan Brewer said Thursday she's angry over comments by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during an interview in Ecuador that announced the Justice Department "will be bringing a lawsuit against the act."
"Gov. Brewer is obviously disappointed in how this was handled," said Paul Senseman, Brewer's director of communication. "You'd think they'd at least have the respect to notify our citizens first."
A video of an interview with Clinton and a TV station from Ecuador circulated on the Web on Thursday. In it, Clinton said: "President Obama has spoken out against the law because he thinks the federal government should be determining immigration policy. And the Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act."
When Governor Brewer met with President Obama earlier this month, she asked that the Justice Department not file a lawsuit against Arizona's Senate Bill 1070.
Five lawsuits have already been filed in federal court, and Brewer said one more would be a waste of both state and federal taxpayer dollars.
Brewer's office and the White House both insist they are still ironing out a schedule for Obama's staff to travel to Arizona to share details about the President's immigration plan to help the state. Brewer also said her invitation remains open to Obama to come see the state's border problems for himself.
It's unclear why Clinton made the comment because immigration law is not her area. She couldn't be reached for comment.
Immigrant families leave Arizona and tough new law (June 22nd, 2010 @ 9:01pm)
By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press Writer
PHOENIX (AP) - "Cuanto?" asks a young man pointing to four bottles of car polish at a recent garage sale in an east Phoenix neighborhood.
The question, Spanish for "How much?" sends Minerva Ruiz and Claudia Suriano scrambling and calling out to their friend, Silvia Arias, who's selling the polish. "Silvia!"
Arias is out of earshot, so Suriano improvises.
"Cinco dolares," she says. "Five dollars." And another sale is made.
As the women await their next customer in the rising heat of an Arizona morning, they talk quietly about food and clothes, about their children and husbands. They are best friends, all mothers who are viewed as pillars of parental support at the neighborhood elementary school.
All three are illegal immigrants from Mexico.
They're holding the garage sale to raise money to leave Arizona, like many others, and to escape the state's tough new law that cracks down on people just like them.
The law's stated intention is unambiguous: It seeks to drive illegal immigrants out of Arizona and to discourage them from coming here.
There is no official data tracking how many are leaving because of the new law. "It's something that's really tough to get a handle on numerically," said Bill Schooling, Arizona's state demographer. "It's not just the immigration bill. It's also employer sanctions and the economy. How do you separate out the motivating factors?"
But anecdotal evidence provided by schools and businesses in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and by healthcare clinics suggest that sizable numbers are departing. Ignacio Rodriguez, associate director for the Phoenix Roman Catholic diocese's Office of Hispanic Ministries, said churches in the area are also seeing families leave.
Priests are "seeing some people approach them and ask for a blessing because they're leaving the state to go back to their country of origin or another state," he said. "Unless they approach and ask for a sending-off blessing, we wouldn't have any idea they're leaving or why."
Ruiz and Suriano and their families plan to move this month. Arias and her family are considering leaving, but are waiting to see if the law will go into effect as scheduled July 29, and, if so, how it will be enforced.
The law requires police investigating another incident or crime to ask people about their immigration status if there's a "reasonable suspicion" they're in the country illegally. It also makes being in Arizona illegally a misdemeanor, and it prohibits seeking day-labor work along the state's streets.
Ruiz, Suriano and Arias are representative of many families facing what they consider a cruel dilemma. To leave, they must pull their children from school, uproot their lives and look for new jobs and homes elsewhere. But to stay is to be under the scrutiny of the nation's most stringent immigration laws and the potentially greater threat of being caught, arrested and deported. They also perceive a growing hostility toward Hispanics, in general.
On the quarter-mile stretch of Phoenix's Belleview Street where both Ruiz and Suriano live, more than half the apartments and single-family homes have "for rent" signs out front.
Alan Langston, president of the Arizona Rental Property Owners & Landlords Association, said his group doesn't track vacancy rates but that his members believe they will be affected by people leaving because of the new law.
The friends say most of the vacancy signs went up after the new law was signed in late April.
"Everyone's afraid," Arias says.
The three friends are key members of a parents' support group at their children's school down the street, said Rosemarie Garcia, parent liaison for the Balsz Elementary School District.
"They are the paper and glue and the scissors of the whole thing," Garcia said. "I can run to them for anything."
With two of the women leaving and the other thinking about it, Garcia is concerned about the school's future.
"It'll be like a desert here," she said. "It's a gap we'll have all over the neighborhood, the community, our school."
Ruiz, Suriano and Arias met three years ago at cafecitos, or coffee talks, held at the school. Now their families hold barbecues together and their children have sleepovers.
Arias, 49, and her day laborer husband paid a coyote to come to Arizona 15 years ago from Tepic, Nayarit on Mexico's central-western coast. Their children, ages 9, 11 and 13, are U.S. citizens.
"I don't want to leave but we don't know what's going to happen," she says.
Ruiz, 38, and her husband, who builds furniture, came to the U.S. from Los Mochis in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa about six years ago on tourist visas, which expired long ago. Two of their kids, ages 9 and 13, are here illegally, while their 1-year-old was born here. The family is moving to Clovis, N.M., where they have family. "It's calmer there," Ruiz says.
Suriano, 28, and her husband crossed the desert six years ago with their then-toddler. The boy is now 9, and the couple has a 4-year-old who was born here. They're moving to Albuquerque, where they don't know anyone but already have lined up an apartment and a carpentry job for him.
"I don't want to go," Suriano says, wiping away tears. "We're leaving everything behind. But I'm scared the police will catch me and send me back to Mexico."
Some people in the neighborhood are not sympathetic.
"Bye-bye, see you later," says 28-year-old Sarah Williams, who lives two blocks south of Ruiz and Suriano with her 5- and 7-year-old children and her aunt. "They're taking opportunities from Americans and legal citizens."
However, Williams, says she doesn't support Arizona's new law because she believes it will lead to racial profiling.
The law still faces several pending legal challenges. The U.S. Justice Department also is reviewing the statute for possible civil rights violations, with an eye toward a possible court challenge.
The law's backers say Congress isn't doing anything meaningful about illegal immigration, and so it's the state's duty to step up. They deplore the social costs and violence they say are associated with illegal immigration.
The law's critics say it will lead to racial profiling and discrimination against Hispanics, and damage ties between police and minority communities.
As the debate plays out, dozens of healthcare clinics in central and southern Arizona say many of their Hispanic clients aren't showing up for scheduled appointments. They say they're either afraid to leave the house or they're moving away, said Tara McCollum Plese, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Association of Community Health Centers, which oversees 132 facilities.
"Some are actually calling the clinics and asking if it's safe to come, if they need papers," since the new law passed, she said.
Sick people avoiding treatment can become a public health problem, she said. "We're actually worried about communicable diseases."
If enough people stop going to the clinics, she said, some services could be cut, and some clinics, especially in rural areas, could be forced to close.
Schools may face laying off teachers and cutting programs because of fewer students, educators say.
Parents pulled 39 children out of Balsz Elementary, which has a 75 percent Hispanic student body, since April 23, the day the law was signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer. In the small, five-school district, parents have pulled out 111 children, said district Superintendent Jeffrey Smith, who cites the new law as the leading factor.
Smith said each student represents roughly $5,000 in annual funding to the district, so a drop of 111 students would represent roughly a $555,000 funding cut.
Many schools across Arizona have seen a steady decline in Hispanic students in recent years, although some district superintendents say the current drop is more dramatic. Schools attribute the declining numbers to the recession and to the state's employer-sanctions law, which passed in 2007 and carries license suspensions and revocations for those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
Area businesses also say they're seeing the effects of people leaving the state.
Steve Salvato, manager at the family-owned World Class Car Wash, just around the corner from Belleview Street, said business is down 30 percent. Salvato said the car wash relies mostly on Hispanic customers and points to the new law for the recent decline in business.
"A lot of people have just packed up and moved," he said, adding that a strip mall across the street used to be bustling on weekends. "Now it's like a ghost town."
A nearby Food City grocery store reports a 20 percent to 30 percent drop in business.
Back at the garage sale, the three friends have a row of tables strewn with Barbie dolls, bicycle helmets, old movies and a Jane Fonda workout video. A laundry basket is overflowing with children's toys, and a shopping cart is filled with clothes.
They are selling off pieces of their lives.
Their easy banter, mostly in Spanish, quickly turns to tears when they're asked about their impending separation. Ruiz and Suriano have pleaded with Arias to follow them to New Mexico.
"They're my companions," Suriano says of the other two women. "We do everything hand-in-hand."
Mexico asks court to reject AZ immigration law
by Associated Press (June 22nd, 2010 @ 4:36pm)
PHOENIX -- Mexico on Tuesday asked a federal court in Arizona to declare the state's new immigration law unconstitutional, arguing that the country's own interests and its citizens' rights are at stake.
Lawyers for Mexico submitted a legal brief in support of one of five lawsuits challenging the law. The law will take effect July 29 unless implementation is blocked by a court.
The law generally requires police investigating another incident or crime to ask people about their immigration status if there's a ``reasonable suspicion'' they're in the country illegally. It also makes being in Arizona illegally a misdemeanor, and it prohibits seeking day-labor work along the state's streets.
Citing ``grave concerns,'' Mexico said its interest in having predictable, consistent relations with the United States shouldn't be frustrated by one U.S. state.
Mexico also said it has a legitimate interest in defending its citizens' rights and that the law would lead to racial profiling, hinder trade and tourism, and strain the countries' work on combatting drug trafficking and related violence.
``Mexican citizens will be afraid to visit Arizona for work or pleasure out of concern that they will be subject to unlawful police scrutiny and detention,'' the brief said.
It will be up to a U.S. District Court judge to decide whether to accept the brief along with similar ones submitted by various U.S. organizations.
A spokesman for Gov. Jan Brewer did not immediately return a call for comment on Mexico's brief. Brewer, who signed the law on April 23 and changes to it on April 30, has lawyers defending it in court.
Brewer and other supporters of the bill say the law is intended to pressure illegal immigrants to leave the United States. They contend it is a needed response to federal inaction over what they say is a porous border and social problems caused by illegal immigration. They also argue that it has protections against racial profiling.
Mexican officials previously had voiced opposition to the Arizona law, with President Felipe Calderon saying June 8 that the law ``opens a Pandora's box of the worst abuses in the history of humanity'' by promoting racial profiling and potentially leading to an authoritarian society.
Calderon voiced similar criticism of the law during a May visit to Washington.
U.S. officials have said the Obama administration has serious concerns about the law and may challenge it in court. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton recently went further by saying a lawsuit is planned.
Arpaio anxious to enforce new law
by Jim Cross/KTAR (June 28th, 2010 @ 6:33am)
PHOENIX -- Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he's looking forward to enforcing Arizona's tough new immigration law which takes effect July 29.
Arpaio has been under investigation by the federal government for 18 months for his enforcement of the state's employer sanctions law.
"For alleged racial profiling," Arpaio said. "I haven't heard anything yet, but that's not stopping me."
Arpaio has been arresting illegal immigrants for three years. The major change is that, under the new law, he can jail them instead of turning them over to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The sheriff said he plans to launch another of his crime suppression sweeps -- aimed at finding illegal immigrants working, possibly with stolen identification documents -- the minute the new law takes effect.
"I'm not going the day after. I'm going to do it the minute after midnight. I'm not going to wait until the day after," he said.
The new law requires local law enforcement officers to question the immigration status of any person they contact and have reasonable suspicion to believe is in the United States illegally.
Ok, Ask everyone if they are here legally. That would eliminate profiling.
Wait. Define "The law generally requires... ". Either the law requires it, or the law does notThe law generally requires police investigating another incident or crime to ask people about their immigration status if there's a ``reasonable suspicion'' they're in the country illegally.
require it.
Does the law allow or require the LEO to ask the question?
Last edited by cico7; 06-28-2010 at 08:31 AM.
The law reads... "where reasonable suspicion exists that a person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when particable, to determine the immigration status of the person."
Obama meets with immigration activistsby Associated Press (June 28th, 2010 @ 1:52pm)
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama is meeting with activists who are pressing him for action on immigration legislation and Arizona's tough new enforcement law.
The meeting Monday at the White House includes prominent labor leaders and Hispanic activist organizations, according to participating groups. It comes as Obama faces calls to move forward on comprehensive immigration legislation, something he's pledged to act on despite long odds of success.
Activists were also expecting an update on the administration's plans to challenge Arizona's contentious new law that requires police officers to question a person's immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally.
Obama is meeting Tuesday with Hispanic lawmakers.
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