Added Scalia: “What I do fear—and what Arizona and the States that support it fear — is that ‘federal policies’ of nonenforcement will leave the States helpless before those evil effects of illegal immigration that the Court’s opinion dutifully recites … but leaves unremedied in its disposition.”
In his aggressive defense of Arizona’s immigration law, Justice Antonin Scalia pointedly went after President Obama’s recent immigration policy shift and accused him of deliberately refusing to enforce immigration statutes.
Justice Scalia wrote a 22-page barnstorming dissent against the court’s 5-3 decision Monday which found major provisions of S.B. 1070 violate the Constitution. The conservative jurist accepted the premise that the federal government has supremacy on immigration, but declared that the Arizona law is “in complete compliance” with federal statutes.
In his point-by-point defense of the Arizona legislation, the avowed law-and-order conservative surmised that the Obama administration “desperately wants to avoid upsetting foreign powers.” He accused federal officials of “willful blindness or deliberate inattention” to the presence of illegal immigrants in Arizona.
“[T]o say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind,” Scalia wrote. “If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.”
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