Judge temporarily blocks Alabama immigration law

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Alabama's new immigration law from going into effect on Sept. 1.

The brief order of U.S. District Court Presiding Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn says she is not ruling on the merits of the motions filed by the parties in court, but will issue an order so ruling no later than Sept. 28.

The injunction is in effect until Sept. 29 or when the judge rules on the motions, whichever comes first.

U.S. Justice Department sues Alabama over law

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued the State of Alabama over a restrictive immigration law called the toughest in the nation.

http://media.al.com/bn/other/U.S.%20Justice%20Department%20lawsuit.pdf

Alabama's new immigration law challenged

On July 8, 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, and the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants Rights Project filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Northeastern Division, seeking to prevent Alabama's new anti-immigrant law from taking effect on Sept. 1, 2011. The law is also known as HB56.

The bill was passed by the Alabama Legislature on June 2, 2011. Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed the bill, making it state law, on June 9, 2011. All provisions of the law will take effect on Sept. 1 except for sections 22 and 23, which concern state law enforcement staffing and coordination, and sections 9 and 15, which concern employment verification and will go into effect in 2012.

That is, unless a federal court judge invalidates, as unconstitutional, all or parts of HB56.

The most interesting aspect of the immigration law is that it creates new state crimes that are tied to one's immigration status or a means or process for determining one's immigration status which, the new law acknowledges, can only be determined by the federal government.

But Department of Homeland Security officials have said its immigration "databases cannot be relied upon to determine immigration status ... because immigration status is dynamic ..." and databases are normally outdated. What I call "garbage in, garbage out." Imagine losing your car, your job, your freedom and your life because your name is "not in the computer", or that's your name alright, but it is attached to someone else's social security number.

In addition to the Supremacy Clause, Fourth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment violations represented by the new Alabama immigration law, which I had seen before in the laws passed in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, what I found interesting were the First Amendment violations, specifically with respect to the Contracts Clause.

The Contracts Clause of the United States Constitution, specifically Article I, Section 10, says, in part, "No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts." Alabama's new immigration law forbids the enforcement of contracts "between a party and an alien unlawfully present in the United States, within the meaning of HB56, if the party had direct or constructive knowledge that the alien was unlawfully present in the United States at the time the contract was entered into, and the performance of the contract required the alien to remain unlawfully present in the United States for more than 24 hours after the time the contract was entered into or performance could not reasonably be expected to occur without such remaining."

That language is tortured, but I think you get the meaning. This one is the most far-reaching provision in HB56. It will affect all manner of written and oral agreements between and among Alabamians and aliens "unlawfully present". Leases, mortgages, deeds, sales agreements, you name it. It makes it impossible for aliens unlawfully present to live here.

Section 6 makes it illegal to enter into a rental agreement with an alien if the lessor knows or recklessly disregards the fact that the alien has come to, has entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law.

Section 6 also makes it illegal to transport or attempt to transport or move an alien in the state in furtherance of the presence of the unauthorized alien in a means of transportation if the person knows or recklessly disregrards the fact that the alien has come to, has entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law. Violation of this provision subjects your vehicle to mandatory immobilization or impoundment. Violation of this provision is a misdemeanor, unless you're caught transporting 10 or more unauthorized aliens. Then it's a Class C felony.

But the provision that attacks the state's obligations to educate children within its borders is the most draconian, in my view. I have long been a supporter of the DREAM Act, which would enable kids who were brought here from south of the border as babies, to get a college education and contribute to our economy. So section 28(a) took unequivocal action to prevent undocumented children and U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents from attending school.

Section 28(a) requires "[e]very public elementary and secondary school ..., at the time of enrollment in kindergarten or any grade in such school, shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the

child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States[.]" It requires educators and teachers to presume that the student is an alien unlawfully present in the United States if the student cannot produce proof of lawful presence within 30 days.

While it is true that the cost of public elementary and secondary school to educate unlawfully present children or the children of unlawfully present alien parents is the single biggest cost of illegal immigration, it is also true that states are required to educate these children in accordance with federal law. To fail to do so will very likely cost the state of Alabama Department of Education, which funds local school boards, around $100 million. My source is the FY2011 Fiscal Stabilization Fund that comes not from Alabamians' tax money, but from the federal government. The feds could pull the money out if Alabama educators and teachers are deemed to be violating federal education policy.

I don't put all of my faith in the courts, even though I'm a lawyer, but I am confident that most federal judges understand the United States Constitution was written to both establish a government and to protect the people from their government. The Fourteenth Amendment, as applied to the states, is the primary tool the federal courts have to protect the people's rights and prevent states from hurting people.

Much of Alabama's new immigration law will likely be struck down as unconstitutional, but depending upon the judge who is assigned to the case, some of the provisions, including the business license provision and/or businesses' mandatory use of E-Verify, might survive.

A tiny bang for your taxpayer buck

According to a new study published by the National Immigration Forum, last year the federal government deported 197,000 immigrants with no criminal record, at a cost of $23,000 each. The government spends $7,500 for every person apprehended on our southern border, a 500 percent increase over what it spent six years ago with no real change in the number of people caught.

While the number of people crossing the border illegally has decreased, the U.S. Border Patrol budget has increased by an average of $300 million since 2005.

The Center for American Progress Analysis found that mass deportation of undocumented immgrants would be very expensive and trigger profound collateral consequences. The total cost of mass deportation and continuing border interdiction and interior enforcement efforts would be $285 billion (in 2008 dollars) over a five-year period.

We need smart immigration reform.

Presumptions

We have changed. The United States has changed -- for the worse, for the worst. We are not the same country I grew up in in the 1950s; we have morphed into an evil, suspicious country that has adopted unfortunate presumptions that have changed the very nature of the United States, its government and its people.

As early as the mid-1990s, I could fly to Frankfurt, Germany, with a German friend and when we landed, my German friend went to Customs, while I went to the Auslander line (for foreigners). But the reverse was not true. When my German friend and I flew to the United States, something changed. Both of us were ordered to an "immigration control" line, as if we were both foreigners? Why? Because the United States had -- overnight -- created a "presumption" that every person who emptied an international flight was an "applicant" for entry into the United States.

All of a sudden, Customs was not good enough for "us" (i.e., those born and raised in the United States). All of a sudden "we" were now considered "not U.S. citizens" until we proved to the satisfaction of an immigration officer (who has no legal jurisdiction over U.S. citizens, by the way) that we "are" U.S. citizens.

It gets worse.

The United States government now has a presumption that "we" are all terrorists.

I am not kidding. Think about it. When you go to an airport to get on a domestic or international flight, you are searched. Why? Because "our" federal government -- which no longer has our best interests at heart -- has adopted a "presumption" that you are a terrorist until you have been thoroughly searched.

A renegade federal government must be opposed when it seeks to usurp rights guaranteed to citizens of the United States by the United States Constitution and federal law.

Something is wrong with this picture. Am I nuts, or are these presumptions counter to everything we hold dear as a nation?

I call it security theater

That's what you witness at U.S. airports. While the Israelis have been profiling for decades, our misguided federal government thinks it makes sense to put your grandmothers and children through full-body scanners or grope them with the innocuous-sounding "pat downs".
What hogwash! Sexually invasive full-body scanners and the sexual molestation of body "pat downs" have turned me off to air travel ... period. From now on, when I travel, I will first consider alternatives to air travel.
I call what you see at U.S. airports security theater because it is designed to make us "feel safe", not actually safe. I went through my first full-body scanner at the Boston airport. At that time (last July), women were not being "scanned".
No Transportation Security Agency employee has ever foiled a terrorist. Alert airline passengers and good domestic and international intelligence efforts have.
Why is our federal government so misguided?
Congress provdes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border when everyone knows that the only border terrorists have ever crossed is the U.S.-Canadian border. Or they have been admitted to the United States at U.S. aiports by helpful employees of the Department of Homeland Insecurity.
New Jersey lawmakers say the full-body scanners are ineffective and they are urging airports to reconsider using the machines.
What we need is smart security and smart immigration reform. Today we have neither. What we need are federal and state governments that look after our interests. Today they don't.
Why not scan cargo that goes in the bellies of passenger aircraft? Why not scan all cargo that will go on any airliner?
What's gone wrong?

It's all over but the quieting

Debate. Unbridled, enthusiastic, energetic debate. There's nothing wrong with it. It's healthy. What we see and hear today is very unhealthy.
What we're seeing on cable TV "news" is not debate. It's all about name-calling and shouting. To attract viewers. To make money.
Most of what we hear is not even true.
But there's a reason we're not hearing debate. Because what we hear on TV is not. It's propaganda.
Joseph Geobbels -- that's right, the Nazi propagandist -- said it best:
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly: It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
And.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
A Prattville, Alabama, woman wrote an important letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, which I quote:
"Hollering 'Socialist', 'Nazi', 'Marxist' and wishing people dead is not political debate. It's ridiculous invective and name-calling that wouldn't have been tolerated on a playground in the America I knew as a child.
"Maybe the debates between John Kenneth Galbraith and William F. Buckley from the 1970s should be made available on TV again. These men disagreed on policy just as vehemently as people do now, but they were able to debate their positions eloquently and civilly, using facts, statistics, and educated opinions. The level of public discourse in this country today is stunningly low and it doesn't bode well for the future."
Hear hear!