SC indicates support for key piece of Arizona Show Me Your Papers law

Interesting news coming out of the Supreme Court. The timing of this case could play a role in the elections in the fall. Alabama and Utah have passes similar laws and I'm sure will be watching this case closely also.

Supreme Court justices strongly suggested Wednesday that they are ready to allow Arizona to enforce part of a controversial state law requiring police officers to check the immigration status of people they think are in the country illegally.

Liberal and conservative justices reacted skeptically to the Obama administration's argument that the state exceeded its authority when it made the records check, and another provision allowing suspected illegal immigrants to be arrested without a warrant, part of Arizona law aimed at driving illegal immigrants elsewhere.

"You can see it's not selling very well," Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Obama administration Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.

http://azdailysun.com/...

The “show me your papers” provision of Arizona’s tough immigration enforcement law is most familiar to the public. It is also likely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

But it is only one of four provisions at issue in one of the most watched Supreme Court immigration cases in at least 10 years. If the Court strikes down any of the other parts of Arizona’s law, like its identification requirements or warrantless arrests, it will be a clear signal to states frustrated by immigration problems that there are limits to their authority.

Arizona’s provision making it a crime for an illegal alien to seek employment was almost a side-note to the discussion, although it is more likely to be struck down by the justices than the other parts of the law. Verrilli was permitted to outline his argument against the provision without interruption, noting that Congress already had established the exclusive framework for employing illegal immigrants in its 1986 immigration law. That law makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers, but it is silent on the criminality of the employees themselves.
http://news.yahoo.com/...

There was also a question of whether Arizona could address the issue of unauthorized workers with it's own law. Justcie Sotomayor vehemently opposed this idea.

Thanks to VClib for pointing to this link.

With Justice Antonin Scalia pushing the radical idea that the Constitution gives states clear authority to close their borders entirely to immigrants without a legal right to be in the U.S., seven other Justices on Wednesday went looking for a more reasonable way to judge states’ power in the immigration field.  If the Court accepts the word of Arizona’s lawyer that the state is seeking only very limited authority, the state has a real chance to begin enforcing key parts of its controversial law — S.B. 1070 — at least until further legal tests unfold in lower courts....

At the end of the argument in Arizona v. United States (11-182), though, the question remained how a final opinion might be written to enlarge states’ power to deal with some 12 million foreign nationals without basing that authority upon the Scalia view that states have a free hand under the Constitution to craft their own immigration policies....

The most important of those remaining challenges is the claim that at least two of the four sections give police authority to arrest and detain people just because they look like foreigners — in a phrase, “racial profiling.” While some of the amici in this case did raise that in their briefs, the federal government has studiously avoided the claim.   And, the moment that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., took his place at the lectern to make the U.S. challenge, Chief Justice Roberts sought to make sure that he did not talk about “racial profiling.”
http://www.scotusblog.com/

Even if the Court did allow all four of the Arizona provisions to go into effect, the case would not be over. The case would still have challenges left in the lower courts. And, the Supreme Court didn't address all of the issues brought before them. In general, the court appeared favorable to this law except for the possibility that Arizona might have overreached and created a state law that covered the violation of a federal law.