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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Monday, June 02, 2014

U.S. and Arizona Yield on Immigration

New York Times
By Fernanda Santos
May 30, 2014

PHOENIX — The Obama administration has moved to drop its legal fight against what is arguably the most controversial provision of Arizona’s sweeping immigration law, the so-called show-me-your-papers provision permitting police officers to pull over people based on the suspicion that they are in the country illegally.

In return, Arizona has agreed to stop fighting to restore a section of the law that gives the police the power to arrest those who harbor people living in the United States illegally.

The deal reflects the consequences of previous rulings on the law, including a 2012 decision by the United States Supreme Court to sustain the “show me your papers” provision, and the court’s refusal this April to review an appellate court’s decision blocking the harboring provision.

In the 2012 ruling, the Supreme Court left the door open to further challenges to the “show me your papers” provision, and that portion of the law remains under challenge in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups on behalf of Arizonans.

In an interview on Friday, Cecillia Wang, director of the A.C.L.U.’s immigrant rights project, said: “It is a good sign that Arizona has finally recognized that the harboring provision is unconstitutional and the state has nowhere else to go. What we hope is that they will also see the light in other unconstitutional provisions of this immigration law, and that’s what we’ll continue to pursue in our case.”

Messages left for the Justice Department and Gov. Jan Brewer’s spokesman, Andrew Wilder, yielded no responses on Friday.

The agreement, signaled in a joint status report filed in United States District Court here on Thursday, would pave the way for the end of a contentious and highly political dispute between the Justice Department and Arizona, but it also makes clear that not all of their differences have been resolved. The sides have not decided what to do about a widely embraced interpretation of Arizona’s human-smuggling laws, through which the authorities have regularly filed conspiracy charges against immigrants who paid a smuggler to bring them illegally into the country.

The deal is subject to approval by a judge. The parties are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

It would nonetheless leave the door open for future challenges by the Justice Department to the “show me your papers” section if there is evidence of abuse, because the department agreed to drop its challenge “without prejudice,” that a new case may be brought.

Signed in 2010, Arizona’s immigration law had been widely regarded as the driving force behind the surge of Ms. Brewer, a Republican, in the polls and her election that year for her first full term as governor. (As secretary of state, she became governor once Janet Napolitano resigned to serve as President Obama’s Homeland Security secretary.)

The harboring ban is one of a handful of provisions in the immigration law that the courts have struck down.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com


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