Arizona's Immigrants Under 'Reasonable Suspicion'

thenation.com — When she heard today’s Supreme Court decision upholding the “reasonable suspicion” (a k a “papers, please”) provisions of Arizona’s SB-1070, immigrant rights activist Isabel Garcia saw the Arizonification of the nation. President Obama’s allies in the immigrant rights movement view the Supreme Court decision to strike down three of the four provisions of SB-1070 as a reason to celebrate and to rally voters in the 2012 presidential race. Garcia does not. In fact, she and many immigration activists throughout the country view the Court’s decision as a threat to the civil liberties of immigrants and non-immigrants alike. They fear how the decision makes “Juan Crow” the law of the land. “The Supreme Court is making it possible for hundreds of thousands of police officers throughout the country to racially profile millions of people,” Garcia stated during a phone interview. “We have not seen the potential for this scale of racial profiling and discrimination since Jim Crow."

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