No doubt in recent days some of our readers here in Columbus have been watching South Carolina as it hosted an important primary as part of the 2012 presidential election process. The state is also the site of one of the more important debates with regard to immigration.
Last month Federal District Court judge Richard M. Gergel decided to block some of the most debated portions of South Carolina's controversial immigration law. The pieces of the law Gergel chose to strike down require the state's law enforcement to check immigration status of any person about which they have "reasonable suspicion" could be in the country illegally.
South Carolina's law, modeled after similar legislation in Arizona, took effect earlier this month. South Carolina's law had been challenged by the A.C.L.U. and Southern Poverty Law Center.
Gergel decided to uphold several other contentious portions of the bill, including one that requires immigrants to always keep their citizenship documentation on their person and another dealing with transporting or harboring undocumented immigrants.
As with the other states that have pushed harsher anti-immigration laws - among them Arizona, Alabama and Georgia - South Carolina feels is that it must compensate for what it perceives are enforcement shortcomings at the federal level.
The biggest problem we have we have with laws like this come with the enforcement portion.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does have have a program called ACCESS (Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security) that essentially deputizes officials at the state level to enforce immigration law.
With thousands of agents across the country, ICE is the second-largest law enforcement agency in the country (after the FBI). The idea of being able to get officials at the local level trained is basically a dream. Having state officials enforcing immigration law without training does seem to be appropriate.
For the most part this appears to be an attempt to circumvent the federal immigration law. As we've been saying for months, issues like this cannot be sufficiently resolved the courts. Congress must step in and come up with a comprehensive plan.
