Oral Argument in Arizona v. United States

The oral argument today in the closely watched Arizona v. United States, involving the constitutionality of several provisions of Arizona's notorious SB 1070 that the DOJ argues are pre-empted by federal law and which the lower courts agreed.  

These four provisions at issue are:

•     Section 2(B): requires every Arizona law enforcement officer to verify the immigration status of every person stopped, arrested, or detained if the officer has a “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country unlawfully;
•     Section 3: criminalizes the failure to carry an “alien registration document;'"
•     Section 5(C): criminalizes undocumented immigrants applying for employment or being employed;
•     Section 6:  authorizes warrantless arrests if based upon probable cause that a person has committed a deportable crime.

 

During the oral argument Justice Sotomayor quickly interrupted Paul Clement, arguing for Arizona,with a focus on the controversial stop provision:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- could I interrupt, and turning to 2(B), could you tell me what the State's view is -- the Government proposes that it should be read on its face one way, and I think the State is arguing that there's a narrower way to read it. But am I to understand that under the State's position in this action, the only time that the inquiry about the status of an individual rises is after they've had probable cause to arrest that individual for some other crime?

Sotomayor persisted raising the "critical" issue of how long and under what circumstances the state would detain someone.  After some discussion, including queries by Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, Justice Scalia asked whether any such problems were "immigration" problems or Fourth Amendment problems.  Yet the questions on 2(B), in conjunction with Section 6, continued to dominate, until Justice Roberts shifted the inquiry:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel, maybe it's a good time to talk about some of the other sections, in particular section 5(C).  Now, that does seem to expand beyond the Federal government's determination about the types of sanctions that should govern the employment relationship.

You talk about supply and demand. The Federal government, of course, prohibits the employment, but it also imposes sanctions with respect to application for work. And the State of Arizona, in this  case, is imposing some significantly greater sanctions.

Clement admitted that Arizona was imposing "different" sanctions, but that the state only targeted employment that was already prohibited by federal law, making it a "weak case for preemption."  Later, Clement answered another question from Justice Sotomayor by saying that there was a "big difference" between "Congress deciding not as a matter of Federal law to address employees with an additional criminal prohibition, and saying that that decision itself has preemptive effect. That's a rather remarkable additional step."   He then essentially argued that the Congressional immigration statutes were out-of-date.

Roberts again took charge and turned the argument to Section 3, the state crime of failure to carry a registration document, which Clement argued was "parallel" to the federal requirements. 

Arguing for the United States, Solicitor General Verrilli had barely finished "may it please the Court," when Chief Justice Roberts posed this query:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Before you get into what the case is about, I'd like to clear up at the outset what it's not about. No part of your argument has to do with racial or ethnic profiling, does it? I saw none of that in your brief.

When Verrilli answered "That's correct,"  Roberts again repeated his statement:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So this is not a case about ethnic profiling.

Justice Scalia quickly articulated a states rights perspective.  Responding to the federal government's position that "the Constitution vests exclusive authority over immigration matters with  the national government," Scalia asked:

1. JUSTICE SCALIA: All that means, it gives authority over naturalization, which we've expanded to immigration. But all that means is that the Government can set forth the rules concerning who belongs in this country. But if, in fact, somebody who does not belong in this country is in Arizona, Arizona has no power? What does sovereignty mean if it does not include the ability to defend your borders?

Chief Justice Roberts explicitly stated "I don't see the problem with section 2(B)," perhaps explaining his earlier effort to clarify that the case was not about "racial profiling." 

Yet the argument did return to this issue.

VERRILLI: . . . . Now, we are not making an allegation of racial profiling; nevertheless, there are already tens of thousands of stops that result in inquiries in Arizona, even in the absence of S.B. 1070. It stands to reason that the legislature thought that that wasn't sufficient and there needed to be more.
And given that you have a population in Arizona of 2 million Latinos, of whom only 400,000 at most are there unlawfully --

JUSTICE SCALIA: Sounds like racial profiling to me.

GENERAL VERRILLI: And they're -- and given that what we're talking about is the status of being unlawfully present --

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Do you have the statistics as to how many arrests there are and how many -- and what the -- percentage of calls before the statute [SB1070]?

The discussions of preemption were often less focused on Congressional intent than on generalized federalism concerns, although at one point Chief Justice Roberts seemed to highlight the only precedent that mattered.  Attempting to engage in an analogy, Verrilli argued:

1. . . . . if you ask one of your law clerks to bring you the most important preemption cases from the last years, and they rolled in the last -- the last hundred volumes of the U.S. Reports and said, well, they are in there. That -- that doesn't make it --

2. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What if they just  rolled in Whiting?

(Laughter)

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: That's a pretty good one.

The analogy was never completed. 

But if Arizona v. United States mimics Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, decided last May and upholding the Legal Arizona Workers Act, we can expect a fractured opinion ultimately finding in favor of Arizona.

RR