The Southern Poverty Law Center led a coalition of civil rights groups today in filing a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama's extreme anti-immigrant law, passed last month and inspired by Arizona's notorious SB 1070.
The Alabama law, HB 56, empowers law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of individuals, makes it a crime to knowingly transport an undocumented immigrant and requires school officials to determine the immigration status of students and their parents, among other provisions. It is set to take effect Sept. 1.
The class action lawsuit charges the immigration law is unconstitutional on multiple grounds. It will subject residents of Alabama – including countless U.S. citizens and non-citizens with permission to be in the United States – to racial profiling as well as unlawful interrogations, searches, seizures and arrests that violate the Fourth Amendment.
The filing of the lawsuit was announced at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in downtown Montgomery, where the SPLC's office is located.
"We have filed this lawsuit today because Alabama's immigration law is blatantly unconstitutional," said SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer. "This law revisits the state's painful racial past and tramples the rights of all Alabama residents. It should never become the law of the land."
The lawsuit also charges that the law's provisions regarding education will deter children from immigrant families from enrolling in public schools and will bar many non-citizens lawfully within the country from attending public colleges or universities in Alabama. These provisions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and are contrary to U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Other provisions deny individuals access to the state's judicial system due to their immigration status – depriving them of due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
Alabama's anti-immigrant law, which is the fifth such state law to pass, is the most extreme in the nation. So far, none of these discriminatory state laws have been fully implemented due to legal challenges.
"Alabama has brazenly enacted this law despite the clear writing on the wall: Federal courts have stopped each and every one of these discriminatory laws from going into effect," said Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "Local Alabama communities and people across the country are shocked and dismayed by the state's effort to erode our civil rights and fundamental American values."
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama on behalf of several organizations and individuals across the state that will be adversely affected by the law. The coalition includes the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Alabama, the National Immigration Law Center, the Asian Law Caucus and the Asian American Justice Center.
rest at http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-launches-federal-court-challenge-to-alabama-s-discriminatory-anti-immigration?ondntsrc=MBQ110770AIQ&newsletter=newsgen-20110708
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