June 25, 2012 05:35 PM UTC

BREAKING: Most of Arizona SB-1070 Immigration Law Overturned

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE #2: Colorado Independent:

“I am pleased that the Supreme Court invalidated the bulk of Arizona’s discredited anti-immigrant law…[T]his ruling makes clear that we must have one federal law that finally fixes our broken immigration system,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Polis in a prepared statement.

“The people who are blaming President Obama for Congress’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform are the same people who praised Arizona’s discredited anti-immigrant law as a ‘model’ or who stood on the sidelines while Senate Republicans defeated the DREAM Act in December 2010. They should be arguing with their fellow Republicans on the need for a comprehensive solution rather than casting blame,” Polis continued.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the majority of the Arizona law underscores that it is the federal government’s responsibility to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” Sen. Mark Udall said. “It also gives further cause for Congress to act on reforming our immigration policy to be tough on lawbreakers and fair to taxpayers while keeping our borders secure. We need to work toward a bipartisan solution to our immigration challenges, while ensuring that we build adequate protections against profiling and discrimination. We cannot fully address the issue of illegal immigration with a patchwork of different laws across the country. Congress needs to act on comprehensive immigration reform.”

Democratic U.S. Sen, Michael Bennet largely agreed with Udall and Polis that the onus is on Congress to pass meaningful reform.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s immigration law has made it clear that Congress has the responsibility to enact a comprehensive and practical immigration policy,” Bennet said today.

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UPDATE: The Washington Post:

The court ruled that Arizona cannot make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to carry identification that says whether they are in the United States legally; cannot make it a crime for undocumented immigrations to apply for a job; and cannot arrest someone based solely on the suspicion that the person is in this country illegally…

[D]eliberations were a revival of the questions of federal power and states’ rights that marked the court’s deliberations about President Obama’s health-care law.

The federal government had contended that the Arizona law, with its aim of “attrition through enforcement,” undermined the federal goal of a cohesive immigration policy by attempting to shift the problem of illegal immigration to other states…

The Obama administration has taken a tough stance against the Arizona law and against most of the other states that have implemented their own laws. Its lawyers went to court early to block SB 1070, and won at both the district court level and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

As a result, the law’s most stringent provisions have never taken effect.

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That’s the word from the U.S. Supreme Court this morning–here’s a link to the decision. Three out of four major provisions of Arizona’s SB-1070 immigration law, many components of which were unsuccessfully proposed in Colorado by Republican state legislators in the last two years, have been overturned. The provision that the Court did not invalidate is the “check your papers” provision requiring law enforcement to check immigration status; but “strict guidance” was given:

CNN Political Analyst Gloria Borger added that the upheld portion of the Arizona law could still be challenged in a lower court, and the ruling “limited the authority of what Jan Brewer’s police officers can do” because they can stop someone but they cannot hold somebody without contacting federal officials.