Feds' move weakens Arizona’s ability to enforce remaining SB 1070 provision

Homeland Security will not send its officers to pick up suspected illegal immigrants snared by local police in Arizona unless the person meets the agency’s priority criteria.

In a move that is a direct shot back at the state following’s today’s Supreme Court ruling regarding SB1070, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security said Monday that immigration officers have been instructed not to go to the scene of a state or local traffic stop to help enforce immigration law, unless the person meets Homeland Security’s priorities:

• Convicted criminals

• Someone who has been deported in the past.

• A recent illegal border crosser...

The Department of Homeland Security has also ended one part of a key program that allowed state and local law police to enforce federal immigration law.

Task force agreements within the program known as 287(g), which is a partnership between federal and local governments that allows local authorities to make immigration-based arrests, have been revoked...

Homeland Security officials say the task forces are no longer ‘useful’ in states that have adopted immigration enforcement laws such as SB1070...

With the new orders from Homeland Security to focus only on priority illegal immigrants, and the rescission of the 287(G) task forces, it appears any changes that would have come from the Supreme Court’s ruling have been nullified.

That’s because even if the law leads local police to refer more people to immigration officials, many of them will not be picked up.