Reply #2: Judge Rejects DOJ’s Challenge To Alabama’s War On Immigrant Schoolchildren [View All]

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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/28/331210/judge-rejects-dojs-challenge-to-alabamas-war-on-immigrant-schoolchildren/

Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn, a George H.W. Bush appointee, just issued an opinion striking down parts of Alabama’s newly-enacted anti-immigrant law. Although the opinion blocks several of the law’s provisions, including the provision making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work, the opinion leaves untouched a provision of Alabama law requiring public schools to systematically determine the immigration status of public school students and to report the number of undocumented students in their district to the state.

Very few undocumented families will be willing to send their children to public school if the school is collecting data on whether or not they should be deported. Accordingly, today’s decision is a victory for Alabama’s efforts to intimidate undocumented families from sending their children to school, and will almost certainly encourage state lawmakers who share Alabama’s hostility towards immigrants to enact copycat laws.

It’s not at all clear, however, that this decision will be upheld on appeal. Judge Blackburn’s opinion relies on irrelevant distinctions, misrepresents binding Supreme Court precedent, and even ignores the plain language of the Alabama law. The meat of the law being challenged in this lawsuit provides that:

Every public elementary and secondary school in this state, at the time of enrollment in kindergarten or any grade in such school, shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States and qualifies for assignment to an English as Second Language class or other remedial program.