SB1070 Update: Kids, don’t forget your papers when you go to school!

by David Safier

Public schools desperately want to stay out of the immigration battles. Administrators and teachers just want to educate the kids who walk through their school house doors and into their classrooms.

I could almost hear the collective sigh of relief when the bill died that said schools have to collect data on students' immigration status.

But SB1070 puts schools right in the thick of things. Every student who can be reasonably suspected of being undocumented — meaning any kid with an accent and/or brown skin — will walk the halls of the school under a cloud.

Pity campus cops, those police officers who are either permanently stationed at schools or who have schools as part of their beat. The best of them want to establish good relationships with the students. SB1070 could make that difficult to impossible.

Let's take a fairly common occurrence at high schools: a locker theft.

A student goes to the office and says his/her locker was broken into and an ipod was stolen. No one saw the incident. But a few kids were seen in the vicinity.

Three kids who are suspects are called in one at a time to talk with the Vice Principal and the police officer. Jim Campbell is questioned, then Terry Southerlin. Both are let go, since there is no evidence connecting them with the break in.

The other suspect is Jesus Gonzales. He speaks accented English and hangs out with Hispanic kids, some of whom speak almost no English.

What we have here is a "lawful stop, detention or arrest" where a "reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States." That means "a reasonable attempt shall be made" to determine whether Jesus is in the country legally.

Reluctantly, the officer and VP ask Jesus for ID that will verify his immigration status. Like most other students at the school who don't have drivers' licenses, Jesus has no papers with him.

What do the officer and the VP do next?

Here's what they better had not do. They'd better not finish questioning Jesus and send him on his way (there's no evidence connecting him with the break in), like they did with Jim and Terry. That could open them to a lawsuit.

For their own protection, the officer and VP had better get in contact with Jesus' parents or guardians to ascertain his citizenship status. Oh, and since the parents or guardians are being questioned regarding a legal matter, it would probably be wise to ask for their papers as well. You can't be too careful when a potential lawsuit is hanging over your head.

This scenario, which creates fear among minority and foreign students, even those here legally, and dread among the staff, creates an atmosphere of tension that is incredibly destructive to the educational process. Yet it's exactly what Russell Pearce wants, the rest of his legislative cronies voted into law, and the governor signed.

As I wrote in an earlier post, Be careful who you transport to church, I can't say for certain this kind of thing will happen. Though I've read the law as thoroughly as I can, it's not clear to me, or to legal minds, exactly what will happen if the law goes into effect. It's sloppily written and leaves lots of room for the enforcers and the courts to come to all kinds of different conclusions.

But it's just because the law is so open to interpretation that the kind of thing I've described is likely to become a regular occurrence at Arizona schools.

Please, if anyone has read SB1070 and HB2162 carefully and can tell me if students at schools will be subject to this kind of scrutiny or not, chime in with comments.