“It’s tough to propose new illegal immigration bills in Arizona,” one state senator told the New York Times this week, “because we’ve pretty much done them all.” Unexhausted by the effort, the Arizona legislature is putting forward a new bill aimed at immigrants in the country illegally, with provisions to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities” and change the way some immigrants are sentenced for crimes. Specifically, the fill calls for unauthorized immigrants to receive the maximum sentence for any crime they are convicted of, stripping judges of discretion in those cases.
This is Arizona’s latest controversial anti-immigrant bill. The most infamous, the SB 1070 “show me your papers” law was largely struck down by the Supreme Court. In that case, the court ruled that Arizona had waded too far into federal legal territory by mandating punishments for immigrants not carrying their documents with them, among other provisions.
Arizona legislators seem confident that this time they’ll be able to pass a bill that passes constitutional muster.
“People who are not citizens of this country are not afforded the same rights as our citizens,” Sen. Steve Smith, Republican of Maricopa County told the Washington Post. “You can like that or you can not like that. I don’t care. That is the law.”
That legal reasoning is has been rejected by some legal scholars and most immigrant advocates, who write that the Fourteenth Amendment generally applies equal protection under the law regardless of nationality . Still, and equal protection challenge could be defended in court, especially if the state can prove that it has a substantial interest in punishing undocumented immigrants unequally.
Opponents of the law hope that it won’t be signed by Gov. Doug Ducey.
"We need to fight for the rights of every person good, bad or indifferent," Sen. Lupe Contreras, Democrat of Avondale told the AP. "When we start classifying certain laws to do certain things to certain individuals, I can't stand for it."
In his annual State of the State address on Monday, Gov. Ducey did not include the immigrant bill on his list of legislative priorities. Instead, he focused on border security in the context of the heroin epidemic in the state, and creating a new office of economic development. It’s too early to tell if Ducey would sign the latest immigration bill if it reached his desk, but it appears that he’s less than eager to face another SB 1070 fight.
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