Houston Area Liberty Campaign

Original Editorial by HALC Member Jeff Larson

Now With 40% More Added Unconstitutionality

Will we be seeing more of these signs soon?

Well, this should be the third and final installment of Arizona Mythbusters, my look at Arizona SB 1070 as modified by Arizona HB 2162.  If you missed the first two parts of Arizona Mythbusters, you can find Part I here and  Part II here.  What I’ve been doing is just looking at the plain text of the new Arizona laws, and just trying to explain what it all really means.

Can you go to jail in Arizona just for taking an illegal to church?

Full disclosure:  I have an ancestor who was a lieutenant in George Washington’s Spy Corps, and I have a niece who is marrying an illegal later this year.  I understand Juan’s English better than I understood some of my grad school professors, and Sammie’s Spanish proficiency has been growing by leaps and bounds…mostly from helping Juan’s family in the kitchen at family get-togethers.

Juan and Sammie are grateful that they don’t live in Arizona.  Since Juan is already “in the system” and on his way to getting a green card because his mother is legal (she got amnesty a few years back), it is extremely unlikely that he’ll be deported unless he does something stupid, and Juan’s not that kind of guy.  But most illegals know someone who has been deported, and are very careful to avoid that fate.  In Juan and Sammie’s case, they’ve been reluctant to come to Texas for fear of him getting into immigration trouble.  They absolutely won’t visit Arizona, because if Sammie was driving, she could be thrown into jail, too.

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It’s Still The “Most Reprehensible Thing Since The Japanese Internment”

Arizona Immigrant

Hey, I hope you had a fine Memorial Day.  Myself, spent some time watching the video my daughter made for her history class, and tried to plumb the inner mysteries of Arizona SB 1070 as modified by Arizona HB 2162.  That’s right, it’s time for the second installment of Arizona Mythbusters!

We last left off with the new Section 11-1051 of Title 11 of the Arizona Statutes.  Today, we’ll start with the new Section 13-1509 that they added to Title 13 of the Statutes.  13-1509, subsection A:

“In addition to any violation of federal law, a person is guilty of willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document if the person is in violation of 8 United States Code Section 1304(e) or 1306(a).”

Hmm.  That sounds like “Your papers, please?“  That sounds reminiscent of second class status of Jews in Germany prior to World War II when they had to have their papers with them at all times and were subject to routine inspections at the suspicion of being Jewish.  Well, according to US federal law (Section 1304(e) referenced above), all legal aliens must have their papers with them at all times and are subject to routine inspections at the suspicion of being an alien.  And that’s been the law of the land since 1940, when we were asking real Nazis in the US for “your papers, please?”  All the Arizona law does is also make it a state crime to be in violation of federal law.  Under federal law, the penalty for having a green card and not carrying it is a $100 fine and 30 days in jail.  Ouch!  Don’t leave home without that green card!  If prosecuted under state law, the penalty is reduced to 20 days for a first offense, 30 days for a subsequent offense.  There may be a loophole, though, that I’ll describe below.

Those Arizona legislators are real softies!

Immigrants really catch a break from Arizona if they never bothered to register in the first place.  Under Arizona law, it’s still a $100 fine and 20/30 days in jail.  On the federal side, failure to register is a $1000 fine and six months in the pokey.  So, if I was an illegal who failed to register, I’d rather be prosectuted by Arizona than by the feds.  Those Arizona legislators are real softies!
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New Arizona Law is “Most Reprehensible Thing Since the Japanese Internment”

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 sure has been in the news a lot lately.  To read some accounts, you’d have thought Arizona Governor Jan Brewer had stolen a few pages from Adolph Hitler’s playbook, crossing out “Jews” wherever she found it and penciling in “Hispanics”.  So, what’s really going on with Arizona’s new laws, and should anyone whose last name ends with a “z” leave the state now before the authorities can finish building the concentration camps?

Should anyone whose last name ends with a “z” leave Arizona before the concentration camps are complete?

The first thing to know about Senate Bill (SB) 1070 is that it’s already been changed by House Bill 2162, which was intended to head off any legal challenges to SB 1070.  HB 2162 has already been signed by Governor Brewer.  In this article, whenever I talk about SB 1070, I’m referring to the version that was modified by HB 2162, since the two bills taken together are the law of the land in Arizona.

So, let’s go through it and see what it says.  There’s a lot to this, so I’m going to have to break it up into a least two parts.
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