Deal Is Reached on Arizona’s Hardline Immigration Law, After 6-Year Fight
Often called the “show me your papers” law, SB 1070 sparked protests, boycotts and lawsuits with its provisions that authorize law enforcement officers to make arrests without a warrant if they have probable cause to believe someone is in the U.S. illegally, and to detain “anyone stopped or arrested for any reason, no matter how minor, until the immigration status of that person is determined,” as NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported in 2012.
After the new deal was reached, KJZZ’s Joffe-Block quoted immigrant rights attorney Victor Viramontes as saying, “For the first time, local law enforcement in Arizona has been directed they cannot make immigration arrests and they cannot extend arrests based on suspicions about immigration.”
The Arizona law quickly became a model for other states where lawmakers saw it as a way to take on the federal government’s approach to immigration.
But the law’s origins went beyond those who were concerned with immigration as a political issue: As NPR’s Laura Sullivan reported in 2010, model legislation that became the Arizona bill first emerged in Washington, D.C., after Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce presented his ideas at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group whose members include the largest private prison company in the U.S.
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