Supreme Court strikes down state anti-immigration legislation

Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided Arizona v. U.S., the case challenging S.B. 1070, an Arizona statute that attempted to augment federal immigration enforcement. The Obama administration argued that the state statute illegitimately regulated matters that must be strictly federal, and the Court largely agreed. The Court declined at this point to strike down Section 2(B) of S.B. 1070, the "show us your papers" provision, which requires state police to check the immigration status of people arrested under non-immigration state law, but did not uphold the provision, either. Its constitutionality will turn on how it is construed; if it is held not to authorize extra detention time, it may be constitutional.

There are five other states with similar pending lawsuits, listed below.

In addition, we have loads of information about nearly fifty other state and local immigration enforcement cases here.