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The Justice Department has urged the Supreme Court to stay out of a lawsuit involving Arizona’s immigration law, saying lower courts properly blocked tough provisions targeting illegal immigrants. The department’s solicitor general said in one of his filings to the justices that the state law is a challenge to federal policy and is designed to establish Arizona’s own immigration policy and because that is why it has taken the role of putting Arizona back in its place, respectfully asking the court to let it do this on its own. Arizona says the law is an effort to cooperate with the federal government. But the reality of it is that the state is not seeking to cooperate with the federal government, it is seeking to deliberately subvert the power the federal branch of government was given by the nation’s Constitution while simultaneously tormenting a great portion of the residents of its state. One provision of the law requires that police, while enforcing other laws, question a person’s immigration status if officers suspect they are in the country illegally. In April, a Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco overseen by a panel of three judges upheld a federal judge’s ruling halting the enforcement of this and other key provisions in the Arizona law. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is seeking to overturn the judge’s decision and wants the Supreme Court to review the case, arguing that the issues are of compelling nationwide importance. But the Justice Department disagrees. The Arizona law has been followed by other states, including Alabama, where lawmakers enacted a requirement that schools check students’ immigration status-a provision that has been blocked until further notice. The DOJ told the high court “that several states have recently adopted new laws in this important area [and that it] is not a sufficient reason for this court to grant review” of the first appeals court decision affirming a judge’s preliminary ruling against part of one of those state laws. The Justice Department, along with around thirty civil rights organization and prominent church leaders are challenging these immigration state laws. The reason for which the DOJ wants our nation’s highest court of law to stay out of this legal issue may be due to the risk involved in this court overseeing the future it, since once a legal question is posed and a legal opinion is adjudicated that legal decision then becomes federal law and is then mandatorily enforced as precedent in states nation-wide. In asking the Supreme Court to abstain from accepting and consequently ruling over this legal question, the government is seeking a chance to put its house in order and take the reigns on the immigration issue once and for all. It remains to be seen how this will all play out.
