By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
PHOENIX — When Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, giving police departments broad power to make immigration checks, she sought to allay concerns from Hispanic citizens and legal residents that they would be singled out for scrutiny.
“We have to trust our law enforcement,” Ms. Brewer said. “It’s simple reality. Police officers are going to be respectful. They understand what their jobs are. They’ve taken an oath, and racial profiling isn’t legal.”
Those words ring hollow to many Latinos, including Jesus Ruiz, 25, a college student in Mesa, Ariz., who, like many Latinos here, believes that all too often the police view them suspiciously and single them out for what they consider questionable stops or harassment.
In one stop in 2004, Mr. Ruiz said, an officer pulled him over for speeding 10 miles over the limit and went on to question him on where he was going to school and whether he lived with his parents, and finally asked for his Social Security number.
“I was thinking, is he supposed to be asking me for that and all these questions for a speeding ticket?” said Mr. Ruiz, who spray painted himself white and wrote on his body, “Am I reasonably suspicious?” at a recent protest against the new law, which goes into effect in late July.
But it is not just young people.
Judge Jose Padilla of Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, says that twice since he became a judge in 2006, the police have pulled him over, alleging minor traffic infractions. Even though Judge Padilla, 60, did not disclose his occupation, he ended up not receiving a ticket. He said his complaints to the police department led to sensitivity training for the officers.
Judge Padilla believes the stops were based on his Hispanic ancestry and the fact that his 1988 pickup truck has large wheels and resembles a low rider, a customized car popular in Mexican-American culture but also favored by some street gangs.
Now, Latinos and several police chiefs say they worry that the law, which requires the police, “when practicable” and if they have reasonable suspicion, to check the immigration status of people they stop, detain or arrest for another reason, will widen a chasm of trust that they have struggled to close.
Those concerns have reached the Justice Department, which is considering challenging the law in court, out of a concern, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on ABC’s “This Week,” that “we could potentially get on a slippery slope where people will be picked on because of how they look as opposed to what they have done.”
Though President Obama again criticized the law at a news conference Thursday, a majority of Americans support it, according to a CBS News poll released Tuesday. But recent surveys suggest a split along ethnic lines, with a majority of Latinos opposed to it. An Associated Press-Univision poll released May 13 showed nearly two-thirds of Hispanics opposed the Arizona law, compared with just 20 percent of non-Hispanics (45 percent favored it and 30 percent were neutral).
Antonio Bustamante, a veteran civil rights lawyer here who is helping organize protests against the law, explained by saying, “The majority in the country has not experienced being profiled so they don’t perceive it as an issue, just like they don’t accept discrimination in the country because they have not been discriminated against.”
Roberto Villaseñor, the chief of police in Tucson, said in a recent conference call with reporters that his city “is divided about this issue,” and he worries that immigrants will not report crimes or turn in criminals out of fear, justified or not, they will end up deported.
The law, Chief Villaseñor said, will instill “a level of mistrust” particularly in immigrant communities and break down years of efforts to combat the perception that the police collaborate with immigration agents.
Already, he said, there are anecdotal reports that some police departments in the state are asking people for their papers. He said his department had received a picture of a patrol car near a Border Patrol vehicle, as if proximity proved that officers were already collaborating to carry out the law.
Tensions between law enforcement and some Latinos have deep roots but have been aggravated by a spate of recent incidents and lawsuits.
A study conducted as part of the settlement of a racial profiling suit brought against the Arizona State Police found that over a one-year period ending in 2007, blacks and Hispanics were two and a half times more likely than whites to be searched by highway patrol officers even though the rate of seizure of contraband among whites was higher than for Hispanics and about the same as for blacks.
Memories also burn strong here of the so-called Chandler roundup, where the police in that Phoenix suburb worked with immigration agents to arrest more than 400 illegal immigrants — stopping scores of Latino citizens and legal residents to check their papers, in the process. The city settled a subsequent lawsuit for $500,000.
Today, a federal lawsuit and a Justice Department investigation continue against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who has been criticized for using stops for traffic offenses in a series of “crime suppression operations” to check people’s immigration status throughout metropolitan Phoenix.
It remains unclear what criteria the police will use in deciding what is a reasonable suspicion a person they stop is an illegal immigrant.
The new state law says the police cannot use race, color or ethnicity “except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.”
Some civil rights lawyers find that clause worrisome.
They note that federal courts and the Arizona Supreme Court have upheld the right of federal agents enforcing immigration law to consider someone’s ethnicity, especially at or near the border, when deciding to question someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant.
A training manual as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program known as 287(g), which deputizes specially trained state and local police as immigration officers, lists a number of factors that can be used to make an immigration query, including “Does the subject have a thick foreign accent or appear not to speak English?” and “Does the subject’s appearance look like it is ‘out of place’ or as though the subject has just traveled?” and “Is the area known for its attraction to illegal aliens?”
Federal officials said the manual was being revised to clarify the criteria and emphasize that several other factors must be considered.
David Salgado, a Phoenix police officer who has filed one of five lawsuits to block the law, said it would be impossible not to take race or ethnicity into account to develop reasonable suspicion, given the proximity to the border and region’s large Hispanic population.
Officer Salgado said the fact that officers can check immigration status only after a stop for another reason is essentially meaningless because “you drive two or three blocks down the street I will find something to pull you over for — going over the double line, forgetting to signal for a lane change, it’s not hard.”
Nina Perales, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which also has sued, said non-Hispanic illegal immigrants would get a free pass.
“How does law enforcement form a reasonable suspicion that a white person is an alien absent a flat-out admission they are?” Ms. Perales asked.
Still, many Arizonans who support the law believe racial profiling concerns are overblown or a smokescreen to hide a belief that borders should be wide open.
“The police will do the right thing. The majority of them do,” said Sunday Schwein, a retired nurse in Payson, Ariz. “I really doubt they will pick people out just because of their race.”
Under an executive order signed by Ms. Brewer, the state’s police training board is developing a training course designed to guide officers in developing reasonable suspicion that somebody is an illegal immigrant.
A letter from the board to the governor last week indicated the training, in the form of a DVD with handouts for every officer in the state, would reflect that given to federal immigration officers as well as the state’s Department of Public Safety.
While several police chiefs oppose the law, groups representing rank-and-file officers support it and play down the concerns about racial profiling.
The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, a union representing police officers that supports the law, said some factors that might provoke reasonable suspicion include someone not carrying identification or using fake identification or possessing foreign identification without a visa.
But many Latinos remain unconvinced.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_st3xFeiuuN17qtdDLG815LmUaEdqLIOhyES7RMFoGQRQR2O69D7OOkFSRDhJ1bqU1FqqrJnxpvtOBraAqxTIGGa61UJJLEBtkd7FaGfmBqOR-xIzqAGgeQK7_RwJOniyZkCwiAcBsh30LHYY_Oikp8=s0-d)
No comments:
Post a Comment