Living in the Shadow of SB 1070: Organizing for Migrant Rights in Arizona

Protesters in Phoenix, Arizona, protest SB 1070 and call for police to stop collaborating with ICE.

Arizona's 2010 immigration law may no longer be making national headlines, but the out-of-control immigration enforcement that made Arizona in-famous continues to intensify, exacerbating the human rights crisis throughout the state.

The situation has only worsened since September 2012, when a U.S. District Judge allowed one of the most egregious provisions of Arizona's "SB 1070" to go into effect. The act codified the Right's strategy of "attrition through enforcement": in other words, amping up the deportation machine while also making life so unlivable for migrant people that they will "self-deport." Section 2B of this notorious law, often callously referred to as its "papers, please" provision, mandates police officers in Arizona to check the immigration status of anyone for whom they have "reasonable suspicion" of being undocumented. In other words, it makes racial profiling into law.

Fernando Lopez is one of the many Arizona residents affected by the law. In June 2011, he was followed by highway patrol for several miles while on his way to work and then pulled over.

"If you look brown, you are seen as a target," Lopez says. "We know the risk of going outside, of going to the grocery store."

Because he could not produce a driver's license, Lopez was arrested. The sheriff's office referred him to immigration enforcement, and he spent a month in a detention center in Florence, Arizona. He is still fighting legal proceedings in order to not be deported. "My bond was set really high, at $10,500," he says. "I only got out because people organized, people raised money for my bail—they made food, washed cars, even when the weather was 120 degrees outside. At the end all we have left is us.... We have to protect ourselves, fight back, organize."

SB 1070 Was Nothing New

Arizona has long-been a laboratory for xenophobic, racist, and nativist innovations in the war of attrition against migrant communities. The Minutemen first gathered here in 2004. That same year, Arizona started requiring proof of citizenship from public benefits recipients. Bans on driver's licenses for undocumented people and English-only rules in public schools followed. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is known for his monstrous treatment of immigrants in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. He holds detained immigrants in "Tent City," an outdoor jail with no temperature controls in Phoenix's brutal 110-degree summers, and has proudly called Tent City his "concentration camp." Arpaio regularly raids workplaces, setting undocumented people up with hyped-up identity theft charges merely for working to support their families, and administrates what the Department of Justice referred to as the "worst case of racial profiling" it has ever seen.

The Obama administration has overseen a record 1.4 billion deportations, and is now responsible for the deportation of approximately 1,400 people a day. Many of these deportations occur because of mandated collaboration between local police departments and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through federal programs such as 287(g) and Secure Communities. Maricopa County was one of the first places in the country to have a 287(g) agreement, which allows police officers to be deputized as ICE agents and instigate deportation proceedings against those arrested. Secure Communities came not long after, cross-checking fingerprints instantly between the databases of police departments and ICE and therefore able to quickly identify the immigration status of anyone who comes into contact with the police, even if their charges end up being dropped. Both of these programs mean that local police officers are enforcing federal immigration laws, inextricably linking immigration, a civil matter, to the criminal system. Many, like Lopez, end up in detention and with the threat of deportation looming because of police doing immigration enforcement work.

SB 1070 and copycat legislation are spurred not just by racism and hate, but also by a corporate profit motive. Many immigrants can be detained for months...