WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is escalating its crackdown on tough state immigration laws, with lawyers reviewing four new statutes including Georgia’s to determine if the federal government will take the extraordinary step of challenging them in court.
Justice Department attorneys have already sued Arizona and Alabama, where a federal judge Wednesday let key parts of that state’s immigration law take effect but blocked others. Federal lawyers are talking to Utah officials about a possible lawsuit and are considering legal challenges in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina, according to court documents and government officials.
Opponents of Georgia’s law have urged the Obama administration for months to join their court fight against it. A group of Atlanta-area immigration attorneys went so far as to sue the White House in federal court here, seeking to compel it to challenge Georgia’s House Bill 87.
In June, a federal judge in Atlanta temporarily halted the most controversial provisions of Georgia’s law amid a court challenge by civil and immigrant rights groups. The state is appealing that decision.
Jerome Lee, an Atlanta area immigration attorney who opposes HB 87, was glad to hear the Justice Department is considering action in Georgia.
“We think that the rather unexpected and shocking result from the Alabama court has served as a wake-up call to the DOJ that it cannot idly sit by and hope that the courts do the right thing,” he said.
“Hopefully, the Supreme Court will eventually resolve this matter once and for all, and stem the anti-immigrant sentiment that is currently creeping across the country; and we believe that there is a much higher chance of that occurring if the DOJ is a party to the litigation.”
The level of federal intervention is highly unusual, legal experts said, especially because civil rights groups already have sued most of those states. Typically, the government files briefs or seeks to intervene in other lawsuits others file against state statutes.
“I don’t recall any time in history that the Justice Department has so aggressively challenged state laws,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University Law School.
The legal skirmishing was triggered by an Arizona law that requires police to check immigration status if they stop someone while enforcing other laws. Amid a fierce national debate, a Justice Department lawsuit led federal courts to block the laws most contested provisions, but at least 17 other states have considered such measures this year.
Before Wednesday’s ruling in Alabama, the Justice Department and civil rights groups had been on a winning streak. The ACLU and other groups have also obtained rulings temporarily blocking all or key parts of immigration laws in Utah and Indiana.
Now, the administration is under pressure from some quarters to intervene in those states, as well as South Carolina, where an immigration law is to take effect Jan. 1. Civil rights groups have been lobbying the White House and Justice and State departments, according to people familiar with the effort, and the ACLU is circulating an online petition calling for federal lawsuits. More than 23,000 people have signed.
On the other side, Utah is lobbying the government to stay out. Mark Shurtleff, that state’s attorney general, said, “We believe our defense is much better if the Justice Department is not the one saying our law is superseded by federal law.” Shurtleff said Utah “worked very hard and carefully to make our law different from Arizona” so it is constitutional.
The legal maneuvering comes as immigration is flaring as a political issue, with many conservatives and GOP presidential candidates calling for a hard line on the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Conservatives have criticized the Obama administration for suing Arizona and Alabama, and some legal observers said they suspect political motives in the administration’s additional steps. The White House and Obama’s re-election campaign have been trying to rekindle excitement among Hispanic voters, many of whom have been disappointed over his immigration policies.
“It suggests that they are waiting to test the political winds and see if this is good or bad for the Obama administration,” said Kris Kobach, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who is helping Arizona and Alabama defend the lawsuits.
Justice officials have denied political motives and said they are proceeding based on the facts and the law. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have criticized the state measures, with the president telling a roundtable with Latino reporters Wednesday that the Arizona law created “a great danger that naturalized citizens, individuals with Latino surnames, potentially could be vulnerable to questioning; the laws could be potentially abused in ways that were not fair to Latino citizens in Arizona.”
Obama added: “We can’t have a patchwork of 50 states with 50 different immigration laws.”
Hovering over the debate is the possible involvement of the Supreme Court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in April that the most contested parts of Arizona’s immigration law will remain blocked. They include allowing for warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants and criminalizing immigrants’ failure to carry registration papers.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is seeking Supreme Court review, and the court could decide to hear the case this term. That would mean a decision before the 2012 presidential election, one that would affect the other state laws as well.
“My guess is that they will take it,” said Jonathan Benner, a Washington lawyer who has argued numerous cases involving federal-state conflicts. “This is the kind of case that is most interesting to the Supreme Court.”
Staff writer Jeremy Redmon contributed to this article.
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