About Damn Time!Follow

As I read it, it's a response to some city mayors declaring their cities to be "sanctuary cities" and directing their police forces to not ever ask about immigration status under any circumstances. I can't speak directly about Arizona laws and policies, but this is a problem in some parts of the South West. All this really does is legalize the power for police to ask about immigration status regardless of what some local city government wants.

They had the power to do this already, since being in the country illegally is a crime. Many police departments were being barred from doing so recently though. Can this power be abused? Sure. So can most police powers. I doubt they'll be running down the streets asking everyone to provide papers or be arrested though. It'll almost certainly be used as another tool to pull gang bangers off the streets when needed though.



I think you grossly misunderstand how most Latinos view this issues in this area. Remember that it's mostly the legal Latinos who's neighborhoods are being terrorized and who's kids are being inducted into Mexico Cartel run gangs. When you get outside of the bubble created by groups like La Raza and Mecha, you'll find that a whole lot of US Latinos tend to support these sorts of legislation. They just don't get seen much on the national news...

I think the point is that right now, even in situations where every single person living in the neighborhood knows who is there illegally and are trying to get the police to do something about it, the police (for any of a number of reasons) aren't taking any action. I suspect that most people don't understand this aspect of the issue. It's not the police wanting powers to come goose stepping through people's neighborhoods and rouse them about their papers. It's people living in those neighborhoods needing some legal power to force the police to get rid of the Mexican gangs invading those neighborhoods. In many cases, the police's hands are tied by well meaning (but still moronic) policy decisions made by people trying to play to the larger national perception of the immigration issue.


When people who don't live in this part of the country look at this sort of thing their first reaction is some kind of anti-immigrant, racist, profiling assumption. They assume that this must be an outrage to Hispanics in the area. They'd be wrong though. As I pointed out above, and as is hinted at (if you look closely) in the article, it's the mostly hispanic citizens living in the area who desperately want and need the police to help them, but due to the national focus of this issue, are unable to get it.