Arizona has more than one hysterical and reckless sheriff
When you see a Drudge hedline like this, you figure it’s about Joe Arpaio:
It’s actually Paul Babeu, the attention queen who appeared in John McCain’s “Complete the danged fence” commercial.
The story is just a posting on a far-right fake-news web site that allows Babeu to natter on about how Barack Obama and the ACLU are teaming up to stop him, Babeu, from protecting the country from a “homeland security threat.”
6:55 AM
Aftermath of the SB 1070 ruling
The last goes into effect today—or at least what’s left of it.
From the Republic this a.m.:
Leading up to 12:01 this morning, when the law took effect:
• Police struggled to figure out how they should enforce portions of Senate Bill 1070 that were not blocked by Bolton’s ruling in favor of the U.S. Department of Justice.
• Gov. Jan Brewer and her attorneys debated whether to fight the preliminary injunction before deciding to appeal amid speculation that the case may wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Demonstrators for and against the statute discussed whether to proceed with statewide protests, including plans for civil disobedience.
• Illegal immigrants, many of them hunkered down or contemplating an exodus from the state, remained in limbo.
• And everyone awaited further rulings from Bolton, who has yet to deal with motions in six additional lawsuits filed against SB 1070 by the ACLU, other activist groups and police officers.
There’s a recipe for chaos!
The federal judge who ruled on Arizona’s tragic, noxious new immigration law on Wednesday did not stop all of it from taking effect Thursday, but she preliminarily halted the worst of it. And although appeals are certain, Judge Susan Bolton offered clear and well-reasoned arguments affirming the federal government’s final authority over immigration enforcement. We hope this is the beginning of the end of the misbegotten Arizona rules and what they represent.
8:16 AM
Russell Pearce: "Phil Gordon is an anarchist!"
Arizona’s goofiest state senator faced off on John Stossel’s Fox show with Nick Gillespie, the longtime editor of Reason magazine, the leading Libertarian publication, and now the head of Reason.TV.
After Stossel asks Pearce about the Phoenix police chief Jack Harris’s opposition to SB 1070, Pearce starts sputtering that Harris is a political appointee “of an open-border, anarchist mayor.”
Hilarity, as they say, ensues:
Later Gillespie and Stossel try to get Pearce to address the plain fact that crime in the state has been dropping steadily for a decade.
If you listen carefully to Pearce’s sputterings in response, you can hear him assert that “child molesters” are coming over the border.
8:22 AM
Pima County medical examiner says July could be "deadliest month of all time" for illegal immigrants
The examiner is quoted in this AP story:
PHOENIX — The number of deaths among illegal immigrants crossing the Arizona desert from Mexico is soaring so high this month that the Pima County medical examiner’s office is using a refrigerated truck to store some of the bodies, the chief examiner said Friday.
The bodies of 40 illegal immigrants have been brought to the office of Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Parks since July 1. At that rate, Parks said, the deaths — which his office has been tracking since 2000 — could top the single-month record of 68 set in July 2005.
“Right now, at the halfway point of the month, to have so many is just a very bad sign,” he said. “It’s definitely on course to perhaps be the deadliest month of all time.”
7:05 AM
The Daily Show visits Phoenix—again
The show’s newest correspondent, Olivia Munn, asks doltish state Rep. Carl Seel why speed cameras are unconstitutional but SB 1070 isn’t.
| Arizona's Photo Radar | ||
8:04 AM
A gay and lesbian group takes a conference away from Phoenix
From the PBJ:
The Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute has chosen Las Vegas instead of Phoenix for its 2011 international conference citing Arizona’s new immigration law.
The gathering brings together gay and lesbian leaders from across the country for training and education.
Phoenix City Councilman Tom Simplot and state Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-15, were leading the charge to attract the group to Phoenix as part of a Phoenix Host Committee.
“Although we are disappointed by their decision to go elsewhere, the reality is that many elected officials can’t or won’t travel to Arizona in their official or unofficial capacities until the federal government, legislature, courts or the people sort out the immigration dilemma,” Simplot said in a statement.
A letter from the GLLI to the committee said that “the current political and legal climate in Arizona makes it complicated to accept your hospitality.”
6:41 AM
Jan Brewer doubles down on lying
The governor said last week that the majority of illegal immigrants were smuggling drugs.
In the face of the predictable outcry—even John McCain distanced himself from the statement over the weekend—Brewer could have acknowledged an overstatement and moved on.
Instead, she’s doubling down on the lie, getting shriller and making even less sense.
Her original quote:
“The majority of them, in my opinion and I think in the opinion of law enforcement, is that they’re not coming here to work. They’re coming here and they’re bringing drugs, and they’re doing drop houses, and they’re extorting people, and they’re terrorizing the families.”
Asked in an interview whether he agrees that most illegal immigrants are “drug mules,” the Republican senator said: “No.”
With the media continuing to press her on the statement, Brewer’s office released a slightly unhinged followup. From the PBJ:
“There has been some media attention in the last several hours regarding statements I made this morning regarding the level of drug and crime activity being perpetrated by illegal immigrants coming into and residing in Arizona,“ Brewer’s said in the statement. "The simple truth is that the majority of human smuggling in our state is under the direction of the drug cartels, which are by definition smuggling drugs.”
Notice how she’s blurring the issue from “illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs” to “they are being smuggled by drug cartels.”
The story continues:
“It is common knowledge that Mexican drug cartels have merged human smuggling with drug trafficking. For example, the Los Angeles Times on March 23, 2009, reported, ‘The business of smuggling humans across the Mexican border has been brisk, with many thousands coming across every year. But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the enterprise to a new level — and made it more violent — by commandeering much of the operation from independent coyotes, according to these officials and recent congressional testimonies.’ This article and many federal government reports have drawn the same conclusions.
“The human rights violations that have taken place victimizing immigrants and their families are abhorrent. Border crossers are used by drug cartels as commodities. Mexican drug cartels have merged human smugglers who use their expertise in gathering intelligence on border patrols, logistics and communication devices to get around even tighter controls. U.S. border officials have stated that traffickers are gaining control of much of the illegal passage of immigrants from Mexico to the United States.”
As with so many debates in this state, the real issue here isn’t what it seems.
Of course Brewer is lying. She knows it’s not true that a majority of illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs. We know from numerous government reports that a big chunk of them are just people who’ve overstayed their visa, and we know that most of the rest are doing menial labor, a lot of it outside in incredible heat, just from simple observation.
The real issue is the state of politics in this state. Brewer’s campaign strategy is now apparent. She’s just going to repeat her mantra:
“Illegal immigration, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, drugs, violence, child porn, tax cuts blah blah blah.”
And the question for the future of the state is whether Terry Goddard can come up with an effective enough campaign to combat it.
7:16 AM
How to think about boycotts
The essay on the boycott by Nate Schulman Yuri Artibise posted earlier brings up some good points about a curious modern political conundrum:
How the victims of a boycott who support its aims should respond to it.
Schulman’s essay makes an interesting point about the double standard to which Arizona is held vis-a-vis California.
After all, California passed its own version of SB 1070 more than fifteen years ago, and it’s true it did pass an anti gay–marriage bill in 2008. (I could even cite an even older example people forget about – the recall of most of the California Supreme Court thirty years ago, which wrenched the state’s courts rightward en masse and produced one of the most repressive judiciary systems in the world.)
The answer to this charge is ..
… Life isn’t fair.
A boycott won’t work in California, even if it deserved it. It’s too big, and its economy, even while it suffers like that of many other states’, is too diversified.
You’d have to boycott Google and California citrus … Pixar and Northrup … Hewlett-Packard and Safeway … Wells Fargo and that great bud from Mendocino.
Second, the lines in California are blurry. The issue with Prop. 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, wasn’t a statewide hostility to gays, it’s that the liberals in the state got outhustled by the yahoos and bigots. (The fecklessness of liberals in the state is a subject for another time.)
Indeed, the state these days (partly as a result of upheavals in the state following its immigration fights in the 1990s) is famously liberal; the Prop. 8 issue isn’t anything that brands the state as worthy of boycotting.
Arizona’s SB 1070, by contrast, fits nicely into the image given to the rest of the country over the last few years:
Boneheads toting machine guns at presidential appearances … Sheriff Joe running around like a latter-day Bull Connor … and now SB 1070.
In other words, Arizona has been asking for it. Any debate over the fairness of a boycott should address that unhappy reality.
7:17 AM
PHXations—Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Arizona Democrats are asking the state Supreme Court to disqualify two GOP candidates:
Democrats on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to overturn a judge’s decision that kept two Republicans on the Aug. 24 ballot, even though the judge found they had broken the law in getting there.
The appeal comes in the wake of a ruling that state Sen. John Huppenthal, a Republican candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, and Bob Thomas, who is seeking the GOP nomination for state Senate in central Phoenix, violated the law when they collected signatures on their nominating petitions.
The two collected signatures before they had formed their campaign committees, Judge Robert Oberbillig found, which is against state election law.
But the punishment for that violation is a fine, he ruled, not removal from the ballot, which is the remedy the state Democratic Party had sought.
Party officials then turned to the state’s highest court for an appeal. Spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson said it would be hard to assign a dollar value to signatures that were collected outside of the official period. A more fitting punishment would be removal from the ballot, she said
Arizona’s Border Security is getting a $50 million boost:
A new $50 million pot is available to local law enforcement in Arizona and along the U.S.-Mexico border for border-security projects.
The money comes from a $94 million settlement that Attorney General Terry Goddard’s office reached with Western Union earlier this year to end a seven-year investigation into drug smugglers' use of wire companies to move money across the border.
Goddard’s office sent out grant applications Monday to city, county and state law-enforcement agencies in Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico. Each state is guaranteed at least $7 million, Goddard said.
The money can be used to attack the issue of cross-border smuggling of drugs, people, weapons or money, he said. The drugs and people come north into the U.S., and the weapons and money go south to fuel the cartels' operatio
Read more at the AZ Daily Star.
Heat City is reporting that the Mexican government has joined the fight to stop Arizona’s immigration law:
The Mexican government formally joined the fight to stop Arizona’s new immigration law on Monday, telling a U.S. court the law “threatens to poison the well” of diplomacy between the two nations and exposes Mexican citizens to racial profiling by police.
In a 28-page brief (pdf) filed in the U.S. District Court of Arizona, lawyers for Mexico said the creation of the law, widely known as S.B. 1070, “has been closely followed at the highest levels of the Mexican government and throughout Mexican society.”
The government said it believes the Arizona law, which among other things makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, violates the U.S. Constitution. It asked the court to throw the law out entirely.
More here.
Border agents captured some elusive prey on the border: More than 100 piñatas of Disney characters, according to an AP story on the KTAR site:
DOUGLAS, Ariz. – It was no fiesta on the Arizona-Mexico border for the driver of a shipment of pinatas that looked like Disney characters.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rob Daniels says officers at the Douglas port of entry stopped a tractor-trailer coming from Mexico for further inspection on Friday.
Officers found the tractor-trailer was loaded with papier-mache items, including 108 pinatas in the likeness of Disney characters on their way to Thornton, Colo.
The story quotes a border official saying, stopping counterfeit goods is “a vital element in national security.”
NYT story on the piñata underground here.
12:22 PM
More on the "Do illegal immigrants cause crime?" debate
The occasionally off-balance Espresso Pundit links to Tom Maguire’s conservative but rigorous Just One Minute blog, debating the premise of the NYT’s Sunday piece looking at Arizona crime figures.
(While the anti-immigrant forces harp on the supposed crimes committed by immigrants, the facts show that crime in the state has been trending broadly down for a decade.)
Maguire makes an interesting point:
That while crime is down greatly in cities like Phoenix, a careful parsing of FBI figures shows that crime is up in non-city and rural areas:
Now, note that the number of crimes is down even in smaller cities, though declining population forces the crime rate higher.
The steep rise in crime in rural areas, though, is interesting. The rate rise is nearly 50 percent. Is that due to alleged crimes committed by illegal immigrants?
Neither Greg Patterson nor Maguire make that case.
As the debate continues, these, it seem to me, are the central questions:
1) First, obviously, are the crimes committed by illegal immigrants … or just good old-fashioned god-fearing, gun-toting, wife-beating thoroughly Caucasian and all-American Arizona stock?
2) Similarly, what kind of crimes are they—car thefts, armed robbery, the sort of things that might be associated with the lurid idea of a predatory immigrant moving north?
3) Rural Arizona is a big place. Are the crimes happening in border towns or up north?
4) What number of crimes are we talking about, anyway? Again, the rate of increase is high.
In sheer numbers, though, the increase totals a bit more than 100 new crimes committed in an area the size of … well, the size of Arizona.
Ninety-nine percent of the state is rural—and the rural population totals about 4 percent of the state’s.
And 100 crimes equals … one third of one percent of the number committed in Phoenix and Tucson.
7:25 AM
The Arizona Republic takes a stand!
The Arizona Republic is so randomly put together and edited, despite the good work of a lot of its good writers, that it’s hard to get a bead on it.
Just to surprise us, the paper runs an unassailably documented, incredibly long, and cogently argued editorial about the much bruited-about political issue of “securing the border.”
The bad news is that it ran on the front page as a news story under a tag of “analysis.”
It was written by Dennis Wagner; it’s a great piece that lays waste to the creeps and poltroons stirring up the cheap seats with fear tactics, and it’s the kind of thing the paper should run more of.
Since it is basically an opinion piece, it’s going to attract a lot of flak, but it’s hard to argue with anything Wagner writes:
Anyone with a minimal knowledge or understanding about the nearly 2,000-mile swath of land between Mexico and the United States realizes that requiring a secure border establishes an impossible standard.
…There is no way to conclude success because authorities have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are getting through. Authorities can count only the number of unauthorized intruders captured. Such unavoidable uncertainty prevents any absolute assurances that no one is sneaking over, making declarations of victory impossible.
The story includes this mischievous passage:
Here is another way to consider the problem: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader in the anti-immigration movement and acclaimed as America’s toughest sheriff, cannot secure his own jails. Every year, despite armed guards, electronic locks and video monitors, inmates smuggle drugs in from the outside and sometimes even escape.
No one would blame Arpaio. All penal institutions, regardless of security measures, have breaches. Yet imagine if America adopted a position that no new laws could be passed regarding prison reform “until the nation’s jails are secure.”
Lots and lots of facts and figures in the (very long) story, which is here.
7:24 AM
PHXations—Friday, June 18, 2010
The AP is reporting that White House staffers will meet with Governor Brewer in Arizona on June 28th
The White House set a June 28 date for staffers to meet with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on her turf and provide more detail on sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
When Brewer met with Obama at the White House two weeks ago, promises were made for the follow-up meeting. The White House announced Friday it was keeping its promised date. Obama is not planning to attend.
CBS News confirms that the federal government will challenge SB 1070:
It was unclear yesterday whether Clinton’s comments were simply a prediction or mistake or whether instead she was getting ahead of a planned announcement by the administration.
Now a senior administration official tells CBS News that the federal government will indeed formally challenge the law when Justice Department lawyers are finished building the case. The official said Justice is still working on building the case.
Whodathunkit? GOP hiding facts about immigration law
It’s typical of Brewer and her Republican friends who consistently have failed to crack down on the violent and criminal acts that accompany illegal immigration. Their patchwork policies do nothing to solve the real problem that Arizonans experience every day.
They failed to point out that the new law will do nothing to stop the coyotes, human traffickers and dangerous drug and arms dealers who cross our border every day.
They don’t mention that the new law is an unfunded mandate and gives police no resources or money to implement the new law. Brewer and Republicans took police officers off the streets when they massively cut public-safety funding this year.
Read the whole thing at Arizona Capitol Times
While Arizona’s politicians have spent time persecuting gays and Mexicans and letting the state’s finances go into the toilet, more industrious folks in town have been working to put us on the map in an important national ranking, the Republic reports:
Arizona now ranks fourth for mortgage fraud nationally. It’s the first time the state has cracked the top five for the problem, according to data released this week from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute.
Florida, New York and California (in that order) rank ahead of Arizona in 2009 mortgage-fraud cases. The most prevalent type of home-loan fraud is application misrepresentation, which includes borrowers lying about income. Overall, U.S. mortgage fraud climbed 7 percent last year.
Officials on the state and federal level are (finally) going after mortgage fraud, the paper says in a related story:
A federal and state law-enforcement task force has accelerated arrests and prosecutions of Arizona residents accused of participating in mortgage-fraud schemes involving kickbacks, inflated property appraisals, phony buyers and other tactics.
There have been 51 Arizona indictments and 13 convictions since the task force was assembled March 1, all of them involving allegations of fraud against lenders, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
2:23 PM
PHXations—Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Yuma Sun is reporting that mayor Al Krieger has attempted to apologize for the comments he made about gays in the military during a Memorial Day speech:
In a phone interview with the Yuma Sun Friday afternoon, Krieger apologized to the gay community.
As mayor I must respect the lifestyle choices of others, no matter how disagreeable they are with my personal beliefs or my personal moral standards.
I apologize for my comments at the Memorial Day service at Desert Lawn cemetery on Memorial Day.
It’s a pretty ‘limp’ apology, if you ask me. Hopefully, the personal beliefs and moral standards of the citizens of Yuma are enough to thrown Krieger out of office next election.
A majority of US mayors have come out against SB 1070:
The U.S. Conference of Mayors has approved resolutions condemning Arizona’s new immigration law and asking Congress for an overhaul of federal immigration policies.
Conference spokeswoman Elena Temple-Webb says both resolutions were approved on a voice vote, with some opposition.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon sponsored the first resolution opposing the Arizona law that makes crossing the border illegally a state crime and requires police to verify people’s immigration status. The law goes into effect July 29.
A second resolution by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa calls for the repeal of the Arizona law and for Congress to pass comprehensive changes to immigration law.
An estimated 200 mayors attended the conference Monday in Oklahoma City.
Starbucks announced it will roll out free wifi in its stores July 1. Wired story on the announcement here.
What can *you do? Continue to patronize the local stores who have been offering wifi as a service to customers for years.
There’s Lux, the Lolas, Fair Trade, Hob Nobs, Unlimited, Copper Star …
The Starbucks method:
Each customer must log in to Wi-Fi and the Starbucks Digital Network with a unique identifier, so Starbucks won’t only know where you are, but who you are, potentially allowing for targeted messaging to offset cost further.
9:13 AM
PHXations—Friday, June 11, 2010
Last Thursday, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC) released a state budget status update on June 3rd. The update was based upon actual revenues through April as well as economic projections.
The JLBC estimates a shortfall in FY ’11 of $368 million, which would increase to $835 million if November’s ballot measures authorizing use of First Things First and Growing Smarter Trust Land funds fail.
These figures take into account revenues from Proposition 100. If Congress does not extend a promised enhanced federal match for AHCCCS, the state’s Medicaid program, the shortfall could increase to $1.2 billion.
Via Phoenix Legislative Action Network (P.L.A.N.)
The National Journal has put together a list of the House of Representative races most likely to change parties this fall.
Tim Sahd adjudges the top 25 … and not a single Arizona race is on it.
The county supes are cutting a couple more of Joe Arpaio’s purse strings.
They found out the sheriff was paying the Kansas attorney who helped write SB 1070 $300 an hour!:
The Sheriff’s Office’s contract with Kris Kobach, an attorney from Kansas who helped write Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, was terminated last month when a representative for interim County Attorney Rick Romley sent a letter announcing the change.
[…]
“It is, I think, further evidence of potential problems with spending of public monies by the Sheriff’s Office,” said county spokeswoman Cari Gerchick. “We can’t imagine it’s an appropriate use of funds.”
Stephen Lemons on the development here:
Nativist attorney Kris Kobach, the man who essentially wrote Arizona’s new “papers, please” law and who had been retained by Sheriff Joe Arpaio to train his deputies on immigration matters to the tune of $300 per hour, has been cut loose by Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, albeit in a roundabout way.
County Attorney spokesman Bill FitzGerald said that Romley, who was appointed to replace resigning CA Andrew Thomas in mid-April of this year, had a letter sent to outside law firms doing work for the MCAO on May 17, telling them their services were no longer required.
10:53 PM
What exactly does Arizona's Tea Party stand for?
Mike Sunnucks, in the PBJ, analyzes the things that motivates Arizona’s wing of the Tea Party folks:
[T]he anti-tax wing of the tea parties was nowhere to be found when the Proposition 100 sales tax referendum was easily passed by voters. Brewer backed that sales tax hike despite it going against conservative dogma. The governor’s signing of the immigration bill erased her tax increase sins.
Right now, the tea party blend in Arizona is anti-immigration and socially conservative. Sure there are tea party folks who care about spending, taxes and Wall Street bailouts, as well as some who simply don’t like Barack Obama being president or trust his own birth papers. But right now, immigration and its social implications are fueling everything political in the state — including the tea party.
6:58 AM
PHXations—Friday, May 28
He would know: Sheriff Joe calls troops at the border election year gimmick
ORO VALLEY (KOLD) – Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says when the Obama Administration talks about 1,200 troops along the border, they really mean 400.
According to Arpaio’s math, if each soldier works 8 hours a day, there can be no more than 400 of them on the border at once.
“What took so long to do it now?” Arpaio asks, during a campaign event for republican congressional candidate Jesse Kelly. “Is it an election year? You think 400 troops are going to solve that problem.”
“You solve the problem like I’m solving it,” he adds. “You go after all aspects of illegal immigration. You arrest anybody that violates the law.”
Arpaio says he supports Kelly, because the two think alike on border and immigration issues.
Kelly is running against State Senator Jonathan Paton. The winner of the republican primary faces Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the November general election.
RIP Gary Coleman.
Child actor Gary Coleman died at approximately 12:05 p.m. Mountain. Standard Time at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. Family members and close friends were at his side when life support was terminated.
Mr. Coleman suffered an intracranial hemorrhage at his home in Utah on the evening of May 26, 2010. As of mid morning on May 27, Mr. Coleman was conscious and lucid, but by early afternoon that same day, Mr. Coleman was slipping in and out of consciousness and his condition worsened.
Family members express their appreciation and gratitude for the support and prayers that have been expressed for Gary and for them.
—-Information from: Utah Valley Hospital.
The NYT has an overview article today on the reactions of Hispanics in Arizona to SB 1070, which delves into the problems that already existed between Hispanics and some police:
Judge Jose Padilla of Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, says that twice since he became a judge in 2006, the police have pulled him over, alleging minor traffic infractions. Even though Judge Padilla, 60, did not disclose his occupation, he ended up not receiving a ticket. He said his complaints to the police department led to sensitivity training for the officers.
Judge Padilla believes the stops were based on his Hispanic ancestry and the fact that his 1988 pickup truck has large wheels and resembles a low rider, a customized car popular in Mexican-American culture but also favored by some street gangs.
“This has been lifelong, these stops,” he said, “and it is not just me.”
There’s a sidebar as well, detailing a campaign by some musicians against the state since the law’s passage:
The campaign, called the Sound Strike, has been organized by Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, and is endorsed by English-language rock and rap performers like Massive Attack, Kanye West, Conor Oberst, Sonic Youth and Joe Satriani. But the signatories also include Spanish-speaking reggaetón artists and Los Tigres del Norte, perhaps the most popular and influential exponent of Mexican regional music in the United States.
An article in Slate argues that the constitutional approach to looking for illegal immigrants is checkpoints:
If Arizona truly wants to identify undocumented aliens in a way that does not undermine legitimacy, it should try randomized checkpoints. Checkpoints are widely used by police to enforce drunk-driving laws and other routine safety checks—such as seat belt laws—that save lives. Police can do a good job finding offenders without having to play their hunches. Policing agencies are required to have a good reason to set up a checkpoint, of course. But once a checkpoint is set up, individual officers don’t need to exercise their discretion. In fact, they can’t under constitutional law.
The Arizona Republic says that schools are reporting anecdotally but consistently that immigrant families are leaving in the wake of the passage of SB 1070:
Teachers and principals at Alhambra elementary schools in west Phoenix, for example, are saying goodbye to core volunteer parents, who tell them that the new migration law threatens their family stability and that they must leave. The district expects the new law to drive out an extra 200 to 300 students over the summer.
Balsz Elementary District in east Phoenix lost 70 families in the past 30 days, an unprecedented number, officials said.
12:18 PM
Will Brewer sign the immigration bill?
The bill passed the senate and now goes to Brewer. New Times’s Stephen Lemons watched the debate this afternoon:
Ken Cheuvront (D-Phoenix) pointed out that regulating immigration was “exclusively a federal power,” so the bill was likely to be found unconstitutional. He called the legislation “extremely un-American” and bemoaned the fact that the bill will target ordinary people.
“We’re going to make criminals of folks who just happen to be grocery shopping, picking up their kids from school, going to visit relatives,” he said.
A full Arizona Republic story on the passage is here.
Will Brewer let Arizona become the harshest anti-immigration state in the country, further cementing the state’s reputation of a xenophobic and intolerant backwater? Given she’s running in a Republican primary for election to a seat she succeeded to, it seems like a moot question.
A few days ago Lemons predicted she would sign it, or let it go into law without her signature. Yesterday, though, he noted that Brewer, speaking before a Hispanic group over the weekend, told the crowd she would “do what I believe is the right thing so that everyone is treated fairly.”
7:54 PM