PHOENIX, AZ | The law firm of
Altshuler Berzon, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the
ACLU of Arizona, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund (MALDEF), and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) joined
together to file a lawsuit in federal court today on behalf of
Chicanos Por La Causa and Somos America challenging Arizona’s new
law that threatens employers with permanent loss of business
licenses based on invalid new state requirements.
The lawsuit
alleges that the new law conflicts with federal immigration law and
the U.S. Constitution. The “Legal Arizona Workers Act” requires
that employers verify the employment eligibility of an employee
through a flawed federal verification database (the Basic Pilot
program) that was intended by Congress to be voluntary and imposes
sanctions beyond what the federal government allows.
“Under
federal law, participation in the Basic Pilot program is voluntary.
By requiring Arizona employers to use this program, the Legal
Arizona Workers Act runs afoul of the Constitution and will subject
all Arizona employees regardless of legal status -- Latinos in
particular -- to potential discrimination based on their race,
ethnicity, or national origin,” said Kristina Campbell, Acting Los
Angeles Regional Counsel and lead MALDEF attorney on the case.
“Arizona’s
statute attempts to override national law and policy on the
employment of immigrants,” said Omar Jadwat, a staff attorney at the
ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “If states like Arizona could pass
their own immigration laws, workers and employers alike would face a
patchwork of conflicting and incompatible requirements based on
local politics and conditions, and it would be impossible to have a
meaningful national policy.”
The state law
also violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment because it deprives
workers of due process, according to the groups filing the lawsuit.
“It becomes easier and safer for Arizona business owners to
discriminate against anyone they suspect of being foreign rather
than risk the fines and penalties associated with a failure to
comply with this law,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze, Executive
Director of the ACLU of Arizona. “That’s not the way this country
works. We make laws to prohibit discrimination. We don’t create
laws that require people to discriminate.”
The law
requires employers to sign onto the Basic Pilot program, recently
renamed “E-Verify,” a voluntary, experimental program that has
gradually expanded to cover approximately 17,000 employers
nationwide. “The Basic Pilot has been plagued with problems,
including failing to identify legally authorized workers due to its
reliance on the error-ridden databases of the Social Security
Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, and the
DHS’s lack of resources to monitor employer compliance with the
rules of the program,” said Linton Joaquin, Executive Director of
NILC, also representing the plaintiffs in the case. “The Arizona
law requires 130,000 to 150,000 Arizona employers to join this
flawed program, and this is truly a recipe for disaster and will
cause grievous harm to legally authorized workers.”
In addition
to Campbell, Jadwat, and Joaquin, lawyers on the case include
Stephen Berzon and Jonathan Weissglass of Altshuler Berzon; Cynthia
Valenzuela of MALDEF; Marielena Hincapié, Monica T. Guizar, and
Karen C. Tumlin of NILC; Daniel Pochoda of the ACLU of Arizona; and
Lucas Guttentag and Jennifer Chang of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights
Project.
Founded in
1968, MALDEF, the nation’s leading Latino legal organization,
promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through litigation,
advocacy, community education and outreach, leadership development,
and higher education scholarships. For more information on MALDEF,
please visit: www.maldef.org.
The ACLU
is a nationwide, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with more than
500,000 members dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality
embodied in the Constitution. Its Immigrants’ Rights Project works
to defend the civil and constitutional rights of immigrants through
a comprehensive program of impact litigation and public education.
The ACLU website is
www.aclu.org.
Since
1979, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) has been dedicated
to protecting and promoting the rights of low income immigrants and
their family members. In the past 20 years, NILC has earned a
national reputation as a leading expert on immigration, public
benefits, and employment laws affecting immigrants and refugees.
Our extensive knowledge of the complex interplay between
immigrants' legal status and their rights under U.S. laws is an
essential resource for legal aid programs, community groups, and
social service agencies across the country. NILC’s website is
www.nilc.org.
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