It’s good to know where U.S. Attorney of Arizona Dennis Burke stands, since his civil rights division will prosecute racial-profiling complaints if SB 1070 becomes law. Read today’s Arizona Republic story here:

Burke calls the law “unconstitutional, unworkable, unfunded and confusing.” He agrees that the federal government needs to do more to combat illegal immigration. But he said SB 1070 is the wrong way for Arizona to respond and instead touts his office’s efforts.

He said there was a time when the office had to turn down cases that dealt with less than 500 pounds of marijuana or illegal immigrants without serious felony records trying to come back into the U.S. Not anymore, Burke said. He said he has added 11 prosecutors to the Tucson office in the past year to allow for more prosecution of border-enforcement and immigration cases.

He said his office has improved its relationship with Mexico, increasing the number of crime suspects extradited to the U.S., working more with Mexican officials on joint investigations and training Mexican prosecutors to better prosecute their own criminals. He said his office has also started paying more attention to the guns and money traveling from the U.S. to Mexico instead of just targeting drugs and people being trafficked in the opposite direction.

“We’ve been confiscating millions of dollars in ways we haven’t done before,” Burke said. “That, more than anything, takes out a drug cartel.”

This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.

4 replies on “Arizona’s U.S. Attorney Calls SB 1070 Unconstitutional”

  1. He who have not sinned, cast the first stone.
    Unless you are a Red Indian, you are also an immigrant.
    My advice is that the federal government should try and protect her boarders, but the law is illegal, unconstitutional and wrong. My question is can two wrongs make a right?. thank you.

  2. Just a reminder that name-calling, personal attacks and … well, whatever you want to call painting an entire group of people with a broad brush (racism, ethnocentrism, name-calling, etc.) is not tolerated at TucsonWeekly.com. Thanks.

  3. How can a law passed by the federal goverment unconstitutional? in 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt sign into law what we call “Alien Registration Act”. This laws specifies that every alien resident in the U.S. shall be registered, fingerprinted, and issue a certificate that must be carried at all times, and display upon request. We are all subjected to a request for “PAPER, PLEASE” when stopped for traffic and other violations. Further more in 1996 president Clinton, concerned about the growing number of illegals in the country and the criminal activity that goes with them, put through an addition to the Alien registration Act of 1940″ to be known as 287(g). It was designed to delegate more authority to state and local authorities while demonstrating,in the words of the ICE on its website “…how a shared approach to immigration enforcement can benefit their communities”.
    The Department of Homeland took 287 (g) went a step further, inviting any state or local law enforcement that wished, to sign memorandums of agreement (MOA) and receive specail training for some of their personnel on the intricacies of 287(g) and how best to round up illegals aliens.

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