Ubaldo Jimenez Detained in AZ As Illegal

I know of one U.S. territory where the courts have interpretted the advance-notice requirement for checkpoints to include time and location of checkpoints.

 

Soooo... if you followed those procedures you could check for pretty much anything that is illegal. Including illegal aliens.

 

The short, honest answer is because William Rehnquist spent his entire tenure pissing on individual rights. He lived for it.

The legal answer is that the Court, against some vehement dissents, said that the state interest in keeping the roadways safe outweighs the 4th Amendment interest. Whenever the Court says it's going to do a balancing test, that means the state is going to win. There's never really any balancing going on.

However, as far as this Arizona law goes, the fact that it's racial profiling will doom it because that will draw "strict scrutiny" by the courts rather than rational basis review deference of the DUI checkpoints and most other legislative acts. The saying goes that such scrutiny is "strict in theory, fatal in practice." I suppose if they wanted to use illegal immigrant checkpoints and randomly pull over ever 10th car or something, and check white people, too, they might have a chance. But they'd have to convince a non-Rehnquist court that the government interest in curtailing illegal immigrants is as substantial as the interest was in keeping the roadways safe from drunk drivers. And considering that the Court has already made clear several times that it has no intent to rubber stamp a patchwork of state immigration laws, it probably will never fly.

 

Even if the Court decided that the state/public interest was substantial enough as it was in the DUI case, you really think that the public is going to lend 70 percent support to THAT law where white people are getting inconvenienced, as well? No. They're going to realize that it is an inefficient waste of resources. So, in other words, the grandstanding Arizona legislators would never pass this one.

 

That's all well and good but the fact is there is a loophole that would allow those checkpoints. Hell the feds do it already.

 

You're correct. And if the Arizona legislators really had any real interest in curtailing illegal immigrants, that's the law they would have tried to pass. But it doesn't play as well at the Tea Party.

 

And if the folks in Washington had the courage to tackle the issue we wouldn't be having this discussion because the pols in Arizona wouldn't have felt the need to grandstand.

Yeah it's probably a bad law but the batshit insane reaction to it is beyond ridiculous. Smearing fucking refried beans on the windows of the state capital building isn't going to win you many converts whether the law is a good one or not.

 

If you forced an immigration-checkpoint system that pulled over as many white-skinned drivers as it did brown-skinned drivers for the same average amount of hassle/time per legal resident, that might be covered by the same type of rules as the DUI checkpoints.
However, keep in mind that DUI checkpoints, hardly a political hot potato, still had to be vetted at the highest level.
Further, as mentioned by Waylon, in practice this would be shouted down by the very people who advocated for it.
If a legal white-skinned driver was detained/hassled for 15 minutes in equal measure to every legal brown-skinned driver was detained/hassled for 15 minutes, there be quick reaction.
And the waste of resources in the practice would be pretty ridiculous.

The short answer is you can't fix the problems with immigration by pulling people over in their cars.

 

There will never be significant federal immigration reform because the liberals want the potential votes and enjoy the pc hammer the debate allows and conservatives want the cheap labor. But if you think Arizona is grandstanding, just wait until Obama and congress get things rolling on immigration.

 

The current lack of an informed, workable immigration policy does create a Tammany Hall-style patronage system.
And illegal immigrants also provide the low-cost labor that is an economic factor to which many refuse to admit.
Both points are true.
This law is more batshit crazy than any reaction to it could hope be.

 

Which reasons?