This week, Fremont, Nebraska residents passed a local anti-immigrant measure that aims to ban hiring or renting to “illegal immigrants.” Unlike the laws passed in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Farmers Branch, Texas, this law was enacted by voter referendum. Otherwise, though, the law is pretty similar to its predecessors — it requires local employers to use a federal database to check the status of employees, and bars landlords from renting to any person in the country “illegally.”

The ACLU has already announced they will be filing a lawsuit to challenge the law.

These cases will take years to make their way to the Supreme Court — the Hazleton case has been going on for about 4 years now, and for some reason the Third Circuit has still not issued its decision. So, practically speaking, it was pretty dumb of Fremont to go down this road. Considering the ACLU (not to mention MALDEF, etc.) have aggressively litigated these types of cases elsewhere — and won — Fremont is in way over its Constitutional head.

The reason these local immigration laws get shut down so readily is that our immigration laws are made by the federal government, and they are immensely complicated. I put the term illegal in quotes above because immigration status is rarely that easy to determine. Even if a person enters the country without papers, they will often acquire valid status later – through marriage, or work, or other operation of the laws.

By way of example, the New York Times recently told the incredibly moving story of a deaf man who came to the U.S. illegally in the mid-nineties and was enslaved in New York until federal prosecutors finally discovered the slavery ring. He was allowed to stay in the country, went to a school for the deaf and then a New York City jobs training program, and now has a green card and works — amazingly enough — as a janitor on Ellis Island. The journeys of immigrants are complicated, and the twists and turns of the immigration laws even more so. Suffice it so say that a town like Fremont has no idea which of its non-citizen residents will end up getting a green card if they end up in federal custody and which will be deported.

I think it also bears mentioning, though, that in addition to be misguided for the aforementioned reasons, so-called anti-immigrant measures should more accurately be called anti-Latino measures. Since immigration status is ambiguous and impossible for local officials to determine, the real purpose of laws targeting “illegals” is generally to harass and intimidate Latino residents. The picture above comes from a bar in Hazleton in 2007, and it gets republished often because it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the ubiquitous signage of the Jim Crow era. I doubt the thousands of undocumented Irish have to worry about landlords giving them a hard time.

All I can hope is that the passage of this law will put even more pressure on the Obama administration to work for meaningful immigration reform in this term.

-AS

These deportations do not fit the standard popular image of the deportee: a temporary worker, maybe, being returned to his home country, probably Mexico. Like Padilla himself, people deported following criminal convictions may be long-term residents in the U.S., with jobs, families, homes, and responsibilities here. In my experience working as a volunteer in an immigration detention center, I met one man who was facing deportation to Mexico even though he spoke almost no Spanish — he moved to the U.S. when he was very young, and only learned English in school.

Given the sympathetic nature of these cases, and the close association with traditional criminal law protections the Court has upheld, maybe it should not have been a huge surprise that this case was successful. (Notably, only famously nutty Scalia and Thomas dissented.) But what makes the decision even more exciting is the way it was decided (major props to my fave Justice Stevens), because Stevens’ majority decision frankly acknowledges what the Court has long denied – that deportation is a drastic punishment:

[A]s a matter of federal law, deportation is an integral part—indeed, sometimes the most important part—of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants who plead guilty to specified crimes.

Later Stevens says that the severity of deportation, like banishment or exile, “underscores how critical it is for counsel to inform her noncitizen client that he faces a risk of deportation.” (The fact that Stevens used “her” when referring to the imagined lawyer only makes me love him the more.)

The other news, you ask? Judge Vaughn Walker (yes, that Judge Vaughn Walker) found the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program illegal. The government will now have to pay damages to the Islamic charity (and two of its lawyers, remarkably) it illegally surveilled in 2004. Hopefully the Justice Department will decide not to appeal the decision and waste more of our money defending these practices.

Also, Wonkette points out that almost all the oil drilling will be polluting the coasts of states that voted for McCain in 2008. Everybody wins today!

-AS