Holder Threatening New Suit

Holder Threatening New Suit Against Arizona

Attorney General Eric Holder is threatening a new suit against Arizona if it's new immigration law shows evidence of racial profiling.

WASHINGTON – Apparently having the Justice Department sue the state of Arizona’s new immigration law is not enough for Attorney General Eric Holder. Nor is it enough that the state has another six lawsuits filed against it.

In this case for Holder nothing appears to be enough. He now says, and the nation’s media publishes, that the attorney general will file another suit against Arizona if evidence shows racial profiling at work.

The Obama administration sued Arizona last week, arguing that the state is impinging on federal responsibilities for dealing with immigration. The state law requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person’s immigration status if there’s reasonable suspicion the person is in the country illegally. It also requires legal immigrants to carry their immigration documents.

The suit didn’t deal with concerns about racial profiling so that it could focus on the most serious problem with the law, Holder said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” In six months or a year, his department might look into the law’s impact on racial profiling, he said.

“If that was the case, we would have the tools and we would bring suit on that basis,” Holder said.

And if that was the case, it would mean that the DOJ’s suit will have failed, for one of the things it requested was that the judge hearing the case issue an injunction preventing Arizona from beginning to enforce the provisions of its law on July 29.

In its story posted on the internet Sunday, The Washington Post said it was rare for the federal government to sue one of the states.

If suing a state once is rare, what would one call threatening to sue again even before the first case is heard?

Or, how could Holder explain all his angst and anger against Arizona for possible future racial profiling, when his department has just dismissed a civil suit against the New Black Panther Movement for threatening white voters in a polling place in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential elections?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who defends the state immigration law as constitutional, said she believes federal officials would have included racial profiling in the suit if they thought it was an issue.

“Why would they have to hesitate, after all the comments they made, and all the outrage that they made against the bill in regards to racial profiling, that it didn’t show up?” Brewer told The Associated Press during a break in the National Governors Association meeting in Boston.

Brewer said she is confident that the state law can be enforced without racial profiling, which she acknowledged is against state and federal law.

“The bottom line is that people in the Southwest, particularly Arizona, we love our diversity. It’s in our DNA. We are almost, I believe, colorblind,” she said. “It’s just not in us. We’ve grown up, we’ve lived next door, we work together, we eat together. I mean, it’s so different than the issues they always want to relate to the South, you know, in regards to the civil rights issues down there.”

The Arizona Latino Republican Association (ALRA), a group representing the voice of conservative Latinos in the state, echoed the governor’s statement and objected vehemently to the federal government’s decision to launch a federal lawsuit against the State of Arizona.

“ALRA would much rather see the federal government using our taxpayer dollars to do its job to secure the border and enforce immigration laws rather than waste Americans’ money on a frivolous lawsuit to fuel ongoing political pandering.” said Jesse Hernandez, ALRA Chairman.

According to an ALRA press release, “The Honorable Steven Montenegro” (an organization member and community advisor) said: “The voters of Arizona and across the country support the rule of law and the hypocrisy of the Department of Justice suing Arizona to prevent laws from being enforced is readily apparent to everyone.”