Bolton denied the request but said she did so only because she'd already issued injunctions on the same provisions based on her finding that Arizona's law was superseded by federal immigration statutes.
The issue was moot for the moment. Bolton stated that she would not "engage in a full preliminary injunction analysis" of the Fourth Amendment claims.
Tim Gabor
Social Eye Media
Governor Jan Brewer signing SB 1070
on April 23, 2010, starting a fight she will never win.
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"[T]here appear to be substantial questions as to whether subsection 2(b) would withstand a challenge under the Fourth Amendment," Bolton wrote in an October 2010 order. "And some of the facts supplied . . . suggest that plaintiffs could demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of this claim."
During the same news conference where the ACLU's Romero spoke, the National Immigration Law Center's Marielena Hincapie, whose organization also is a plaintiff in Friendly House, made a promise that I hope she can keep.
"We will be moving in the next days to ask the court not to lift the injunction based on our other constitutional arguments," Hincapie averred, adding, "We believe Judge Bolton will continue blocking section 2(b) from going into effect."
And if Bolton doesn't do as Hincapie anticipates, the ACLU has amassed an $8.7 million war chest to battle 1070 in Arizona and the copycats it's spawned in other states.
And Brewer thinks this is a big win for her side?
Only in the sense that, temporarily, some cops in Sand Land may racially profile more than they already do, which is a lot if they're deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
Fear and racial profiling always have been what 1070 is about. By implementing a policy of "attrition through enforcement," the nativist element that currently rules the Arizona GOP sought a kind of ethnic cleansing for the state, believing it would purge this place of its Hispanic population, or at least enough of it to stave off that demographic's inevitable appropriation of political power.
Political expediency, bigotry, and the profit motive of the private prison industry propelled our political leaders to seek unprecedented immigration powers for the states.
On the whole, they were denied when the Supremes kicked to the curb three provisions of 1070 even more egregious than 2(b), provisions I dealt with in a post-decision blog item ("SB 1070 Ruling: States Do Not Have Carte Blanche," June 25).
For the 1070 clones in other states, like Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere, the decision does not bode well.
Law professors Jack Chin and Marc Miller, of the University of California-Davis and the University of Arizona, respectively, wrote in a joint analysis of the ruling that it could sound the "death knell" for "local legislative immigration innovations."
If anything, Brewer and her fellow nativist slugs remind me of that classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur bests the Black Knight, cutting off both of his arms.
When the knight continues to fight, Arthur cries, "Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left."
To which the knight replies, "It's just a flesh wound."
And that's what Brewer and the other Mexican-haters think they've sustained, a flesh wound.
