ACLU of Washington and Shankar Narayan Lie about AZ Law

Shankar Narayan of the ACLU of Washington this week had a press conference to say that saying that Arizona's law establishes "racial profiling."

By now, we all know that's a lie. The law expressly prohibits racial profiling, and further says that all reasonable suspicion must be based on existing state and federal laws, which already prohibit it. Narayan said, "We know that you simply cannot enforce a law like SB 1070’s Section 2(B) without engaging in racial profiling, because people will inevitably be targeted based on how they look or sound." That's simply a lie. We know no such thing.

For example, maybe they will only use the law based on a combination of factors that have nothing to do with how someone (in terms of ethnicity) "looks or sounds." If someone is blond and white, and is going 75 in a 55, and gets pulled over and has no ID and can't speak English (only German), then that's certainly reasonable suspicion, without resorting to any racial profiling at all. Of course, what's more likely in Arizona is that it won't be a blond white German, but that's beside the point.

Narayan and his ACLU of Washington are lying, pure and simple. And there's a reason why: they dislike the law, and so they want it defeated, but they cannot do that unless they convince people it facially violates the Constitution; so they invent lies about how it cannot be enforced without resorting to racial profiling. And now they and their friends are going to look to manufacture evidence of racial profiling for an as-applied challenge.

I am not saying I like this law (I think it's probably a waste of resources, and will likely cause harm to people who should be very low law enforcement priorities, if not legalized); and I am not saying that if the law is violated, the state and its agents shouldn't be held accountable.

But clearly, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with using your head to reasonably suspect that someone isn't here legally, without resorting to racial profiling, and instead of engaging in a witchhunt over it, they should focus their efforts on inventing a time machine so they can go back to 2009 when Obama and Democratic majorities and actually could have passed immigration reform and made it law.