Law Enforcement Opposition to SB 1070

Interesting, well-articulated article from Alternet...

------------

Why Law Enforcement Officials Should Hate Arizona's Racist New Law

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on April 30, 2010, Printed on April 30, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146677/

William John Cox has worked as a prosecutor, a public defender, and decades ago, a police officer in El Cajon, California, not far from the Mexico border.

"Sometimes, in the early morning we would see illegal immigrants trudging north carrying their few belongings in the knit shopping bags known as 'Tijuana briefcases,'" he recalled in a posting on Facebook, following the signing of Arizona's draconian immigration law. "We would stop them, ask for the papers, and arrest them if they had none. When the border patrol officers picked them up at the station, they would leave a box of practice ammunition as a reward for each one arrested."

Those were the '60s. A few years later, in the early 1970s, Cox was tasked with authoring the Los Angeles Police Department's new policy manual. He and his colleagues weighed whether this sort of collaboration between police and immigration officials made sense. The answer, they determined, was no: such practices would undermine law enforcement by creating a chilling effect in the very communities police rely on to solve crimes. This logic would be codified in 1979 by the L.A. City Council and then-Police Chief Daryl Gates, who implemented Special Order 40, a mandate that forbids "initiat(ing) police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person." Despite attempts by right-wing groups to challenge the order, it has been upheld in court ever since.

In Los Angeles, Cox told AlterNet in a phone interview, "they decided that if you have police officers who are enforcing immigration laws, then what happens is that you cut off that voluntary flow of information that is essential for law enforcement in a free society."

"Say a woman has been raped," he explains. "Is she going to come forward and say, 'Yes, I've been raped,' if she will then get deported for reporting her victimization?" Fear of deportation would not only mean her rapist could get away with his crime, but would be free to go on and victimize someone else. "There is a value to society in having her come forward," Cox says.

Dr. Richard Weinblatt, a former police chief and deputy sheriff who once worked on the border in New Mexico, agrees. Like Cox, he is adamantly opposed to Arizona's new law, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that it will prove to be counterproductive for police. "[As] somebody who's had his boots in the dirt doing border policing as a local deputy sheriff," he tells me, "you spend so much time trying to get the most vulnerable of our society, particularly women and children who are in pretty brutal domestic violence situations, to trust you -- and you can barely get them to do that. And now with this -- forget it. You've got almost no chance. It disenfranchises them even more."

Signed into law on April 23, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 mandates that local police demand verification of a person's legal immigration status "where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States."

If the person is unable to verify that he or she is in the country legally, "a law enforcement officer, without a warrant, may arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States."

According to Weinblatt, this forces the hand of law enforcement in situations where action may not be called for. "This law says that if the officer or deputy sheriff on the local level -- a non-immigration, non-border patrol person -- feels that they have developed 'reasonable suspicion' that a person is an illegal alien, they are mandated -- they must, there is no discretion here -- they are mandated to investigate."

"For most officers in the field, reasonable suspicion is a very gray area," Weinblatt says. In the jump to reasonable suspicion, "police are going to have to be able to articulate certain facts that made them go further. Well, what kinds of facts would make them go further? You can guess it yourself: If the person is darker than me, if a person has more of an accent than me. Well, what is that? That's racial profiling."

Cox agrees that racial profiling -- "behavior that we do not want to encourage" -- will be an inevitable result of the law. "Once you start down that slope of saying it's now okay to stop every Hispanic-looking person and asking for their papers," he says, "then you're just asking for a police state."

This is no exaggeration. In a state where racial profiling is already rampant, the coercive language of the new law "effectively compels Arizona police to make immigration enforcement their top priority," argues National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn, who wrote an article this week laying out the legal case against the law. "Indeed," she writes, "several law enforcement groups oppose SB 1070."

The Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, an organization of police officials who favor federal immigration reform, condemned the law, saying it would probably result in racial profiling and threaten public safety because undocumented people would hesitate to come forward and report crimes or cooperate with police for fear of being deported. The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police also criticized the legislation, saying it will "negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner"; the group believes the immigration issue is best addressed at the federal level.

Lawsuits and Frivolous Lawsuits

Less than a week after the law was signed, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Arizona and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), announced a plan to launch a legal challenge to SB 1070. In a press conference on the lawn of Arizona's House of Representatives -- featuring civil rights leaders Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez, as well as singer Linda Ronstadt -- local advocates spoke out against the law, citing its numerous constitutional transgressions. Central among them: the law violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which gives the federal government sole authority to regulate U.S. borders. It also violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause, which states that "no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

"The Arizona community can be assured that a vigorous and sophisticated legal challenge will be mounted, in advance of SB1070's implementation, seeking to prevent this unconstitutional and discriminatory law from ever taking effect," MALDEF president and general counsel Thomas A. Saenz said. The law takes effect 90 days after its signing.

For the state of Arizona, combating these lawsuits will prove to be costly, swallowing resources that could be allocated to any number of other projects, including effective law enforcement initiatives that do not rely on racial profiling. Even more absurd, Weinblatt points out, is "the way the law is set up, regular citizens can sue local law enforcement agencies if they feel that they are not doing an adequate job in enforcing this." Indeed, a provision within the law states: "a person may bring an action in Superior Court to challenge any official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state that adopts or implements a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law."

As Marjorie Cohn writes, this means that "even if a municipality is innocent, it will still be forced to rack up exorbitant legal fees to defend itself against frivolous lawsuits."

Then there's the "flip side," according to Weinblatt: "People who are stopped and asked to prove their legitimacy, if you will -- they can sue. So now you have a situation where fiscally strapped government agencies are going to be sued whether they do it, and sued whether they don't do it."

For Weinblatt, who is based in Ohio, this is especially alarming given that politicians in his state have already vowed to pursue similar legislation. This week, Republican State Representative Courtney Combs, along with Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, sent a letter to Gov. Ted Strickland, urging him "to employ your leadership role as Governor to assure legislation is passed that will mirror that of the illegal immigration legislation" in Arizona.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the letter was sent "on the same day Jones was getting ready to lay off 10 more corrections officers, deputies and members of his staff. The layoffs, the second round this year, were prompted by budget cuts in the sheriff's office in the last two years, bringing the number of eliminated jobs to about 50 positions since 2009."

"In Ohio, we've had departments shut down, we've had officers laid off. Ohio has had a long history of fiscal problems," says Weinblatt. "They've got stretched resources to begin with -- and now you want to saddle them with another duty? And if they do it or they don't do it, they're likely to have to defend themselves in a lawsuit?"

Getting police officers involved in immigration work is not like training for traffic stops, says Weinblatt. "There are so many different nuances to immigration law, so many different types of status, classifications of people, different types of visas." In order to do it right, police officers would have to be trained, at considerable cost, in all of these nuances. Such training, he argues, would take place off-site, and departments would have to hire temporary replacements to fill the gap. "From a police chief's perspective, it's a logistical nightmare."

When it comes to local police and immigration enforcement, argues Weinblatt, "they should not be involved at all. And if they want to get involved, they should have discretion."

Must Police Officers Enforce All Laws?

In 1971, President Richard Nixon established a National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. William John Cox wrote the opening chapters of the Police Task Force report for the the commission. At the time, he says, the major discussion that took place posed the question: "Must police officers enforce all laws? Or can police administrators establish policies in which they decide how they are going to allocate their resources?" For example, should police be cracking down on such relatively minor crimes as "corner vendors without permits, or low level narcotics offenses -- or immigration"? The priority, most rational people would conclude, should be more serious or violent crimes.

Ultimately, the new law in Arizona is not about crime at all -- although politicians would like their constituents to believe it is. (The claim that "half of the murders in Phoenix are committed by illegal aliens" is completely spurious, argues Weinblatt. "When they do the crime statistics, they don't report it by illegal alien versus legal alien. So that's a problem right there.") Instead, the new law is tapping into anger and angst over high levels of crime in border states, over devastating economic conditions and rampant unemployment.

"I think this is more related to hard times," says Cox. For an equivalent moment in U.S. history, he says, "you have to go back almost to the Chinese exclusion laws in California at the turn of the century."

"So many Chinese workers came into California and the Western United States to build railroads and so forth -- but then they began to establish themselves into the cities such as San Francisco." When hard economic times presented themselves, "people started saying, 'Wait a minute we have to do something about them.' So in San Francisco, for example, they passed a law that said that in order to operate a laundromat, it had to be in a brick building." (At the time, most Chinese laundromats were not in brick buildings; it was a blatantly discriminatory law.)

Cox cites vigilante groups like the (now-defunct) Minutemen as helping set the stage for Arizona's new law -- "In a way what we're seeing is an extension of that" -- but it is as much about economic distress. "What we're experiencing right now is really high true unemployment … People are getting really antsy they are getting scared -- and it's really easy to turn on immigrants."

Weinblatt agrees that "politicians are tapping into a vein of public sentiment, particularly in the Southwest."

"I'm not saying that the folks in Arizona don't have a legitimate beef with the federal government and with the system the way it's working," he says. "I'm not saying that they don't have real concerns."

"The biggest crime of all this," says Weinblatt, "is that the folks that are suffering and are the saddest of victims, they become victimized even further. Because now where do they turn? They can't even turn to the police now can they?"

As a police officer in New Mexico, "I used to go to eight to ten domestics a night," he says. (A "domestic" is police slang for domestic violence.) "Now the people who can come to the house to save them are also the enemies. To me that's horrible. That absolutely goes against everything that we in local policing are supposed to stand for."

In fact, the situation he confronted with domestic violence calls serves as a useful analogy for the new law, he says. "It's like, I'm going to walk into a domestic and I'm going to try to solve in 20 minutes what took maybe 20 years to develop. This is a simplistic, knee-jerk reaction. You can't expect local law enforcement officers to try to go in there with a Dirty Harry kind of approach of crime control and try to solve a problem on a simple level. This is a complex political problem, it needs a political solution that comes out of Washington DC."

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. Follow her on Twitter.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146677/

"I'm Mexican, Pull Me Over."

This is where you need to get the news on Phoenix from...

Hey - check out the car!

------------------from The Feathered Bastard------------------

Linda Ronstadt Returns, Joe Arpaio Hunts Hispanics, and ACLU Announces Plans to Sue Over SB 1070

Phoenix New Times
By Stephen Lemons
Wednesday, Apr. 28 2010

Categories: Feathered Bastard

EarlyOnsetofNight

One way of combating Sheriff Joe's anti-brown sweeps, and SB1070 to boot

Tomorrow will be a big day in Sand Land, with Latina pop icon Shakira meeting with Mayor Phil Gordon over their opposition to Arizona's new racial profiling law. Normally, that alone would make for a huge news day here in Cactus Country, but both the ACLU and Sheriff Joe plan to kick it up a notch.

Arpaio's just announced that his 15th anti-immigrant dragnet will start tomorrow, with a press conference scheduled for 4 p.m. This is the press advisory sent out by Arpaio's flak:

"As previously promised, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will kick off his15th crime suppression/illegal immigration enforcement operation which will utilize nearly 150 deputies and posse volunteers. The area targeted for this suppression operation, Arpaio says, was chosen weeks ago because of its high concentration of drop houses and human smuggling transportation routes as well as overall crime statistics and will be announced on Thursday by Sheriff Arpaio at his 4PM press briefing. That briefing will be held in front of the Sheriff's Training Academy at 2627 South 35th Avenue in Phoenix."

BTW, I spotted an apparent mistake in this advisory. It should state,

"The area targeted for this suppression operation...was chosen weeks ago because of its high concentration of Hispanics."

In this regard, catch a clue from the above photo from the blog Early Onset of Night. Maybe those activists who will be monitoring (read, "dogging") MCSO vehicles during tomorrow's sweep of brown people should do something similar to their cars.

In sympathy, I plan to spray-paint myself a nice, dark tan, blast La Campesina from my car stereo, hang a Shakira air freshener from my rearview window, and tell the deputy dawgs that pull me over that I'm actually Horatio Sanz.

Hey, there's more than one way to skin a story.

Also on the front burner for tomorrow is a press conference being given on the steps of Governor Jan Bewer's office by the ACLU of Arizona, MALDEF and other groups announcing their intent to sue the state over the recently signed SB1070.

Grammy-winner Linda Ronstadt will be coming up from her home in Tucson to be present for the presser tomorrow. You'll recall that Ronstadt was in Phoenix for a massive march to Joe's jails back in January. She'll be joined by representatives of the various organizations involved, as well as by Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America.

I'll attend the Ronstadt event and follow-up afterward. Regarding the Arpaio presser, "America's Toughest Sheriff" is too much of a pantywaist to allow me into his press conferences.

He must be afraid that I'll ask him a tough question, like,

"When you're indicted by the feds, do you want to be arrested with a pair of your own pink handcuffs?"

Or...

"As a prospective resident of a federal prison facility, do you prefer being on the bottom or the top -- um -- bunk?"

SB 1070: Still A Bad Law.

Patchwork changes to immigration law came in waning hours of session

By Evan Wyloge - evan.wyloge@azcapitoltimes.com

Published: April 27, 2010 at 7:24 pm

Arizona Capitol Times

One week after Gov. Jan Brewer gave Arizona the toughest immigration law in the U.S., state lawmakers added changes that would limit the scope of the law and protect local governments from lawsuits.

The changes were sought by lawmakers who voted for Arizona’s new immigration law after striking a deal with immigration hawk Sen. Russell Pearce.

Rep. Russ Jones, who was one of three Republican lawmakers to vote against a similar bill in 2009, said he agreed to vote for S1070 this year in exchange for Pearce’s promise to make changes to it in follow-up legislation.

The resulting bill, H2162, was approved on April 29, just hours before the end of the session.

H2162 prescribes a few key changes to the new immigration law, clarifying both the definition of lawful contact and guidelines for municipalities, as well as lowering the minimum — not the maximum — fine that can be assessed to cities that have so-called “sanctuary city” policies. It also restructured some of the punitive actions that a court would apply to those charged under the new law.

Representatives of the law enforcement community say the changes significantly alter the way police would have to enforce the law and the way they would be accountable for doing so.

Lyle Mann, who runs the day-to-day operations of the Arizona Peace Officers Safety and Training Board (AZPOST), said the fine points of the trailer bill are vital to the street-level execution of the new law. His group, incidentally, has been tasked by the governor with turning the provisions of the new law into a specific and manageable training rubric for police agencies across the state.

One of the changes to S1070 removes the word “solely” from the description of the new law’s lawful contact, when it comes to race. So, now race, color or ethnicity simply cannot be used as part of reasonable suspicion.

Mann said this is a huge simplification for his organization’s task, and should settle at least some of the fear over racial profiling. Now, his organization will simply be able to tell police agencies to have their officers understand that race is not a reason to initiate contact.

“It should quell the fears that a lot of people have vocalized,” Mann said. “This will make the training and policymaking much clearer and simpler.”

H2162 also narrows what is banned at the county, city and municipality level, changing it from a “policy or practice” to just a “policy” preventing police officers from using the new immigration law to its fullest extent.

With the independence that police officers rely on, Mann said, management of their activities is nearly impossible. So their “practices” are made at the officers’ discretion. The officers are trained, though, to rely on the “policies” their agency set.

“A ‘policy’ is the written instruction that tells officers how a task is to get done. ‘Practice’ is the actual activity carried out in support of that policy,” Mann said. “So the city of Phoenix might have 3,000 officers on the street. It’s much more difficult to control how those officers carry out their practices.”

Removing the words “or practices” from the new law goes a long way in protecting police agencies from lawsuits and fines, Mann said, because AZPOST will give guidelines, cities will turn those guidelines into “policy,” and the cities then would not be at the mercy of litigation coming from any resident who feels like the police agency isn’t enforcing the law to the fullest extent.

In addition, Jones said Pearce agreed to lower the fines assessed to local governments that violate the law. In S1070, a local government or agency initially could have been fined between $1,000 and $5,000 per day if an Arizona resident filed suit against them in Superior Court.

Jones wanted the fines cut in half, because he thought those numbers were arbitrary. Pearce only met him part of the way.

Instead of lowering both the maximum and minimum per-day fines, Pearce kept the $5,000 maximum and changed language in H2162 that would lower the minimum fines to $500 per day from $1,000 per day.

“Pearce says he thinks it’s important to have a sanction,” Mann said. “So you have to say, ‘OK, what’s a reasonable sanction? Do you get a better outcome with a bigger sanction?’ And you have to remember, if the city of Phoenix gets fined $1 million, they can’t open parks, they can’t operate their libraries, they take that money from schools. (Jones) is saying you can get the same compliance with half those numbers.”

Nancy Jo Merritt, who has 32 years of experience as an immigration attorney, said she understands why Jones and the law enforcement agencies would be so concerned over these small changes.

“This law is going to be so hard to comply with, so why make the punishments so harsh?” she said. “It’s like the assumption is the only way to get cities to follow this law is by threatening them with the death sentence.”

The last change outlined in H2162 concerned a phrase that said lawful contact can include an officer’s use of the new immigration law “in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state.”

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Phoenix, harped on this new phrase, saying it will mean that law officers will be able and compelled to check the status of a person, even if the police officer were responding to some sort of civil town ordinance, like an overgrown lawn, a fence in disrepair or a barking dog.

Sinema said police officers could previously only use the new immigration law when they encountered someone during the enforcement of a criminal or civil traffic violation, and that this will expand the way police officers could contact, then detain people while checking their federal immigration status.

Pearce denied that this change means much, and said police would already have been able to use the new law when making contact with a person for such civil ordinances. He said this new language was only added to further clarify the way police are authorized to use the new immigration law.

Mann of AZPOST agreed with Pearce, saying police officers would have the ability to use the new immigration law during any type of contact with any person, regardless of this new language.

“Police officers do this every day. It’s called a ‘Terry Stop,’ after the Terry v. Ohio case,” Mann said. “Let’s say there are some guys playing basketball in a park. The officer walks up and says, ‘Hey guys. How’s it going?’ That’s lawful contact. It’s a standard voluntary stop.”

Pearce said the changes in H2162 were something he agreed to, in order to get the votes he needed, and that he thinks he lived up to his bargain.

“I wasn’t excited about it, but we did it,” Pearce said. “(Jones) ought to be happy with the changes, I kept my word.”

Do Not Enter: AZ POLICE STATE.

Phoenix, April 29, 2010 rush hour, WB Loop 202.

(This would seem to suggest that a boycott is in order.)

(SENATE BILL 1070: full text)

The Legal Battle over SB 1070 Begins.

-----------From the ColorLines Magazine Blog, Racewire, today-------------

The Lawsuits Are Here: ACLU, MALDEF, NILC Challenge Arizona

Julianne Hing

Immigrant and civil rights groups are set to announce in Phoenix today that they are ready to take on SB 1070, Arizona’s new law that demands that law enforcement officers pull over and question anyone they believe may be in the country without papers. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and its Arizona state chapter will challenge the law’s constitutionality on the grounds that the bill sanctions racial profiling.

This collection of groups is the same that fought California’s Prop 187. And both MALDEF and the ACLU have been involved in court battles to overturn local ordinances in Farmers Branch, Texas and Hazleton, Pennsylvania, that tried to bar undocumented immigrants from renting property in the town. Thomas Saenz, the president of MALDEF, Alessandra Soler Meetze, the executive director of ACLU-Arizona, Dolores Huerta, famed labor and immigrant rights’ leader, and the singer Linda Ronstadt are expected to speak.

Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law on Friday, defended her decision then by issuing an Executive Order that demanded appropriate training for law enforcement officers so they could enforce the law without resorting to racial profiling.

“Racial profiling is illegal,” Brewer said on Friday. “It is illegal in America, and it’s certainly illegal in Arizona.” When pressed though, she couldn’t provide specific criteria that police should rely on.

Elsewhere in Phoenix, the 24-hour vigils outside the state Capitol building are now in their eleventh day. And international pop star Shakira is rumored to be meeting with Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon to lend her support to the town in its efforts to fight SB 1070.

[update 2:44pm EST] This morning, two other lawsuits were filed against SB 1070. The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Phoenix charging that the state bill violates federal law by trying to enforce immigration laws on its own.

And The Arizona Republic reported Tucson police officer Marin Escobar filed a lawsuit this morning charging that SB 1070 forces law enforcement officers to rely on racial profiling to comply the law. Escobar challenged SB 1070, saying that there is no such thing as racially neutral criteria when it comes to visually determining a person’s immigration status.

May Day with Goddard

and Young Dems, trying to snare more youth in their traps...(they can't even bring themselves to call it May Day or celebrate workers themselves, so I'll be elsewhere that night...)

Shame on them for spending precious resources at the Biltmore on this. Guess the ASU Memorial Union or some community center where real people can go isn't good enough.

If these campaigns are just about money, then how are we ever going to get heard and represented?

No wonder the poor are the one who end up in prison.

------------------

The next Governor of Arizona, Terry Goddard is now scheduled to join us at Heritage After Dark. Don't miss this chance to hang out with our Attorney General, the man who will get Arizona working again!

Every dollar raised will go to our efforts to reach young voters and turn them out for Democrats!

Heritage After Dark

With invited guests

Attorney General Terry Goddard

Arizona Democratic Party Chair Don Bivens

Saturday, May 1^st 2010

6:00pm

@ the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa

2400 East Missouri Avenue

Phoenix, AZ 85016

Please visit www.ydaz.org for more information and to RSVP

Purchase your tickets today!

$20 - Young Democrat (under 36)

$50 - Single Ticket

$90 - 1 ticket plus a friend ($10 off)

Sponsorships

$100 - Congressional Sponsor

(Includes 2 tickets and recognition at the event)

$250 - Senatorial Sponsor

(Includes 4 tickets and recognition at the event)

$500 - Presidential Sponsor

(Includes 8 tickets and recognition at the event)

Purchase your tickets today!

Schedule permitting, special guests will join us at Heritage After Dark. Attendance at the dinner is not required to attend the After Dark event and there will be a cash-only bar on site.

Capacity is limited, and entry is guaranteed by payment only; online purchase is suggested.

Please visit www.ydaz.org for more information and to RSVP.

This event is free to any YDAz Change for Change member; please RSVP to info@ydaz.org or our office at 602-234-6809 as soon as possible.

Signs of the Times: The Real Resistance Begins.

Sorry not to get these photos up sooner - technical difficulties and competing demands. They pretty much come from the Capitol complex and downtown Phoenix, and were almost all taken between Wednesday, April 21 and Sunday, April 25, 2010.

This gives me hope, which I wanted to share...

Across from the 4th Avenue Jail,
in solidairty with the Capitol Nine.

This guy was awesome.
He stood his ground awhile there, facing down the white supremacists.

My favorite local band, The Haymarket Squares,
in front of the 4th Avenue Jail, Phoenix, supporting the Capitol Nine.

4th Avenue Jail

this guy reminded me of my dad...

Code Pink!!!

(this is from the 1st Amendment Right Cronkite night in January...
just couldn't resist.)

FREE:
The empire is growing more brazen...

mock funeral for faith in leaders...

f@*% the border.

wonder what this was about?

F*@% the Arizona Republic, too.

Calling out the Governor at the Sheraton.

Girl Scouts against SB 1070!!!
Right ON!!!

plastered all over town:
remembering slave patrols.

This guy put his Mexican flag right in the nativists' faces and caused a stir -
even Puente was trying to shut him down.

SB 1070 is child abuse.

AZ State Senate Welcoming Committee:
"NO RACISM!!!"

lots of people of faith...

somewhere over the 202, Phoenix.

Light Rail Stop, Phoenix:
SB 1070 = Racism

4th Avenue Jail.

"undocumented driver aboard"

...I also think I'll start hiring myself out as a day laborer, so I know the ropes by the time it's outlawed. Think they'll arrest a white disabled woman for begging for work? I'm sure there will be a big demand since brown people are quickly being banned from working in this state precisely so there are more low-wage jobs for white people. They need to stop educating us and put us to work in McDonald's for subsistence wages or they'll have a revolution on their hands...

Oh - they already do!

YAY!
Hooray for SB 1070!
Thanks Jan Brewer and Russ Pearce!!!

Now lets bury this thing for good.