Arizona legislators want unlawful presence to be a felony crime

From an interview with Jennifer Allen, executive director of Border Action Network, on legislative developments in Arizona.

Arizona’s ‘False Leadership’ on Immigration Policy - New American Media

What would the Illegal Aliens Enforcement and Trespassing bill entail?

It has two components to it. The first part is that the bill would prohibit any city, country or town of the state of Arizona to adopt any kind of policy that would limit the enforcement of federal immigration laws to the full extent permitted by federal law.

In the legislature, they’ve been talking about this as trying to attack these so-called sanctuary cities in the state of Arizona, of which there are none. At all. We have a couple of police departments around the state, Tucson, Phoenix, Chandler, that have police policies that provide protections to victims and witnesses of crimes, that if they are undocumented, immigration will not be called.

The other piece of the bill – I think it would be the first one in the country – would say that anyone who is on public or private land in the state of Arizona could be charged with a felony, with criminal trespass, if they cannot prove that they are in the country legally.

Essentially it would become this statewide racial profiling law, where law enforcement sees somebody who, completely based on their appearance, they think may not be in the country legally, they can go up and ask them to prove their lawful presence in the country. And if they can’t prove it, the state can then charge them with criminal trespass.

What are the arguments behind this bill?

There are two really disturbing and shameful statements. One is that Russell Pearce thinks that the Border Patrol is simply too effective. They pick people up, and then they’re so promptly deported that they never serve any time in the state of Arizona. So he wants people to be picked up and sent off to Joe Arpaio’s tent cities or other county or city jails, and then handed over to immigration. And last year, the Phoenix Police Officers’ Association had said that they liked this bill because it would give them “preventative police powers.”

SB 1175, as grossly unconstitutional as it seems -– I mean it kind of destroys the notion of probable cause for stopping and questioning people -- this bill is moving quickly through the legislature. It was heard in Committee on the 10th, and by the 15th it passed the entire Senate and was passed over to the House.