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ARIZONA IMMIGRANTS FEAR RETURN TO MASS ARRESTS AS STATE PASSES
‘SECURE OUR BORDER’ ACT  
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Maanvi Singh
November 20, 2024
The Guardian
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_ A generation of Arizonans revolted against hardline immigration
policies and won important battles. This year, the state voted to
bring those policies back _

Migrant women hold their children along the border wall as they await
apprehension after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico., REUTERS/Adrees
Latif

 

The news that Arizona
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had approved the so-called “secure our border” initiative hit
Reyna Montoya like a gut punch.

The measure – proposition 314 on the ballot – makes crossing the
US-Mexico border without authorization a state crime, empowering local
officials to arrest and deport border-crossers and enhancing criminal
penalties for unauthorised immigrants who apply for public benefits.

The initiative is modelled after a Texas law that is currently being
challenged in court, and some of its key provisions will be blocked
until the Texas law, or another similar law, is allowed to take
effect.

But when implemented in full, immigrant rights groups fear the measure
could bolster Donald Trump
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the “largest deportation operation in American history
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and deputise local law enforcement agencies to help him expel as many
as 11 million people living in the US.

Montoya, who founded the Phoenix-based non-profit Aliento to support
undocumented people and their families, said she has spent the last
several days trying to reassure employees, friends and clients, and
making sure they know their rights – even as she fears for her own
safety.

“My biggest fear is that I’m gonna get rounded up, and put in a
detention centre myself,” said Montoya, who was granted a temporary
legal permit to remain in the US that she fears the Trump
administration
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revoke. “This is the reality that I’m living with. That is the
reality that undocumented people are waking up to today.”

It’s a familiar fear.

This year’s initiative is strikingly similar to SB1070, a now
notorious state measure known as the “show me your papers” law,
which 14 years ago made it a crime to be undocumented in the state,
deputising law enforcement to demand “papers” from anyone they
deemed suspicious.

“It caused so much emotional trauma,” said Montoya, who herself
was undocumented when the law was enacted. “There was so much
anxiety and uncertainty and stress.”

[people walking ]

A family of five walk through the desert after crossing the US-Mexico
border on 29 August 2023 in Lukeville, Arizona. Photograph: Matt
York/AP

Back then, Joe Arpaio, the hardline sheriff of Maricopa county who
became known as “the Donald Trump of Arizona
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took up a crusade against undocumented immigrants, empowered by SB1070
to stage “round-ups” in Latino neighbourhoods in and around
Phoenix. His deputies swept up hundreds of people without evidence of
criminal activity.

Montoya, who had been brought into the US as a child without legal
authorization, remembers how terrified she felt driving to school each
day. “I remember being at each stop sign, and counting very slowly
to five ‘Mississippis’ so police officers wouldn’t have any
reason to pull me over,” she said. “It took so many survival
skills to make it through.”

It wasn’t only immigrants who suffered, Montoya said. As Arpaio he
focused on working with the Department of Homeland Security to round
up immigrants, violent crimes – including sex crimes –
went uninvestigated
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Businesses that had long relied on undocumented workers struggled to
hire staff
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the state’s hospitality and tourism industry took an additional hit
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cities and businesses boycotted Arizona over its harsh policies.

Nearly 15 years ago, the passage of SB1070 was an inflection point in
Arizona’s politics. Anger and betrayal over the policy bubbled into
a powerful resistance, galvanising a generation of young Latinos and
immigrants – Montoya among them – to action. For more than a
decade, they fought to tear down the law and vote out its strongest
proponents. They protested in the streets, and fought in the courts.
They mobilised tens of thousands of voters of colour who helped
transform the deep-red state into a political battleground. Many
successfully ran for office themselves.

Four years ago, Montoya and her cohort of activists celebrated as
Arizona flipped blue – electing a Democrat for president for the
first time in 24 years, and electing Democratic majorities to the
state legislature for the first time since 1966. Four years before
that, the state voted out Arpaio.

“We felt so proud because we did it: we ousted the people who had
come after our community,” said Raquel Terán, a former member of
the Arizona house of representatives and state senate who started her
political career as an organiser against SB1070 and the far-right
officials who promoted it.

But a backlash
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also beginning to build. Calls for more aggressive immigration
enforcement followed national concern over increasing numbers of
migrants at the US southern border. Trump and his allies began
ratcheting up their xenophobic rhetoric. This summer, the state
supreme court rejected
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lawsuit filed by immigrant rights groups to remove Proposition 314
from the ballot on constitutional grounds.

Still, the election results hit longtime organisers in Arizona like a
blow. “It feels really heavy,” said Terán. “I’m trying to
process it as much as I can. But sometimes I also freeze, and I’m
like: ‘Oh God, this is all so much.’”

There is a dissonance, she said, in the fact that in the same election
that Arizonans ratified Proposition 314 and elected Trump, who
campaigned on a promise of mass deportations and championed the idea
that migrants are “poisoning the blood
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of our country. Arizonans also chose Ruben Gallego as their senator
– bolstering a young, Latino politician who got his own political
start alongside Téran and the anti-SB1070 generation.

As in other states, Arizonans’ perceptions of the economy
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a driving force in the election. But polls also found that Arizonans
of all demographics and political affiliations wanted the government
to reform its immigration system
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address the rush of migrants at the southern border – they
were divided
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how
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address the crisis.

“I think there has been some sort of disconnect, where people forgot
the impact of these laws,” she said. “We need to continue to
organise, and continue to help connect the dots of how these policies
will impact peoples lives.”

Montoya and others wondered if Republicans’ choice to market
Proposition 314 as the “secure our border act” confused voters,
who didn’t realise that the law had very little to do with border
enforcement and much more to do with policing inside the state.
“People maybe didn’t have time to do the research because they are
working nine to five jobs and maybe have a second job to make ends
meet,” she said. “My hope is that these people will realise how
this will impact all Arizonans … and that it’s not too late to
speak out.”

Counterintuitively, among those who do remember the impacts of SB1070,
and oppose its revival, are small town police and sheriffs in the
vast, rural counties along Arizona’s border with Mexico, who they do
not have the resources or ability to enforce immigration. The state
legislature has not provided any additional funding to the law
enforcement who would be deputised with enforcing immigration policy.
Some sheriffs have also said it would encourage racial profiling.

David Hathaway, the sheriff of Santa Cruz county, just south of
Tucson, said that the law relies on a “racist” mechanism,
encouraging officers to stop anyone who looks like a migrant. That
could be fruitless, in a county where 40,000 out of 49,000 residents
identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 78% speak Spanish at home. “It
would be ridiculous for me to go up to practically every single person
in my county and say: ‘Let me see your papers, I need to check your
immigration status,’” Hathaway told the Guardian in September.

Human rights and immigration groups, including the American Civil
Liberties Union, have vowed to continue fighting Proposition 314 and
prevent its full implementation.

“Arizona’s original ‘show me your papers’ law was held to be
largely unconstitutional by the US supreme court in 2012. Our state
has been down this road before with costly litigation,” John
Mitchell, an immigrants’ rights attorney for the ACLU of Arizona,
said in a statement.

At the same time, advocates are scrambling to prepare to react to the
law, and are bracing for more round-ups and ramped-up threats against
immigrants as Trump moves to implement his plans for mass
deportations. The progressive group Lucha, for example – which
knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors ahead of the election urging
people to vote for Kamala Harris
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Proposition 314 – has now kicked its immigrant education program
into high gear.

“We want to make sure we’re educating the community about what
will be coming down the line,” said César Fierros, a communications
director at Lucha. The group’s immigrant services department has
been urging community members who are eligible to apply for green
cards, renew their visas and make sure paperwork is up to date before
Trump is sworn into office.

Activists and advocates have also redoubled efforts to share
information about legal resources for those fighting deportation,
drawing on lessons learned from Trump’s first term, and from the
years that Arpaio and SB1070 reigned. When legal manoeuvres stalled or
failed, it had become common practice for activists in Phoenix to
rally supporters to stage protests against the arrests and deportation
of community members. “We have to be unafraid, not timid, when it
comes to resistance towards the Trump administration
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policies like Prop 314,” said Fierros.

_Maanvi Singh is a west coast reporter for Guardian US based in
Oakland, with a focus on health, climate and environmental justice
issues_

 
 

* Arizona
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* anti-immigrant
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* border wall
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* mass arrests
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