Papers Please! The Arizona Police State

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

David Safier was way too polite in his treatment of this issue. David Neiwert, a reporter who has written extensively about right-wing extremist groups has this post at crooksandliars.com. Papers Please: In attacking illegal immigration, Arizona transforms itself to a police state

Well, you gotta figure that if crypto-fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio loves it, and if it's authored by another neo-Nazi-loving guy, Sen. Russell Pearce, Arizona's newest legislative attempt to crack down on illegal immigration is probably not going to be very good law.

And indeed it is not:

Arizona lawmakers on Tuesday passed one of the toughest pieces of immigration-enforcement legislation in the country, which would make it a violation of state law to be in the U.S. without proper documentation.

It would also grant police the power to stop and verify the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being illegal.

… Under the measure, passed Tuesday by Arizona's lower house, after being passed earlier by the state Senate, foreign nationals are required to carry proof of legal residency.

Papers, please! You can hear the officers now.

From the L.A. Times report:

"It's beyond the pale," said Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "It appears to mandate racial profiling."

… Opponents … raised the specter of officers untrained in immigration law being required to determine who is in the country legally. They noted that though the bill says race cannot solely be used to form a suspicion about a person's legality, it implicitly allows it to be a factor.

"A lot of U.S. citizens are going to be swept up in the application of this law for something as simple as having an accent and leaving their wallet at home," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

Law enforcement officers are blanching as well. Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank remarked, "This sets law enforcement back 30 to 40 years."

As Mario Solis-Marich put it:

Arizona is the Alabama of the new century and Maricopa County is the new Selma. America and the world should boycott GOP Governor Jan Brewer’s red state.

I know I will. Of course, Arizona was already the subject of a travelers' advisory by Arthur Frommer over the gun-toting nuts who show up at presidential political rallies there.

Isn't it odd, really, how these right-wingers complain about government tyranny and how liberals are imposing a police state, yaddah yaddah yaddah, yet in the states where they have full control, they eagerly institute a police state themselves?

You can now be stopped and questioned by law enforcement in Arizona simply for appearing Latino in public.

I had an experience with this myself many years ago when I was in college. I was traveling across country on a Greyhound bus in Texas when the bus pulled over to the side of the road. Law enforcement entered the bus (I believe they were Border Patrol, I cannot recall specifically) and started asking passengers for identification — but only Latino appearing passengers.

A woman sitting across from me only spoke Spanish and did not understand what the officer was asking her in English (he either did not speak Spanish or would not do so). The woman did not understand, so the officer became visibly irritated and asked her for identification in English in a louder voice (because that always makes a foreign language understandable). I offered to speak to her and with my poor Spanish I was able to help her understand that the officer wanted identification. She produced the identification to the officer's satisfaction.

I then asked the officer "Don't you want to see my identification?" The officer became angry and told me to shut up or he would arrest me for interfering with an officer (and after I had just assisted him). Yeah, no racial profiling there. By the way, everyone "guilty" of appearing Latino in public on that Greyhound bus had proper identification, and the bus was allowed to go on its way.

From a press conference earlier this year, the "Four Horsemen of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria" in Arizona, J.D. Hayworth, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Sen. Russell Pearce, and (former) Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. None of these men should ever serve in elected office ever again. (And neither should any of those Yahoos standing behind them, either.)