Immigration News Coming Out of Arizona

With just over a week to go before Arizona’s anti-undocumented immigrant law goes into effect, immigration is taking center stage in The Grand Canyon State.

The USA Today has a story about the law’s opponents and ongoing lawsuits to halt the July 29 enactment date.

Ashley Cooper, a student at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, is not Hispanic and is living in the U.S. legally, the paper notes, but she is just one of the many volunteers with the Repeal Coalition, a group trying to repeal Arizona’s law. The city of Flagstaff has said it will not enforce Senate Bill 1070.

Lawyers on both side of the debate are working overtime on several lawsuits, The USA Today says:

Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall says she has cobbled together a team of her attorneys to dive into immigration law for the first time. With no financial assistance from the state for the added work, her team has amassed more than $40,000 in attorney hours figuring out how to handle the new law, she says. "One of my attorneys said, 'I go to bed thinking about this law, and I wake up thinking about it,' " LaWall says. "That's not healthy."

On Thursday, a hearing for the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which argues that immigration enforcement is a federal issue, is set.

In other news, more than 500 National Guard soldiers will be coming to the border in the next few months. Altogether, 1,200 soldiers will be deployed to the border. At the announcement earlier this week, an official with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they were going to pay particular attention to Arizona.

"We're placing a particular emphasis on the Tucson sector, an area favored by smugglers and the principal point of illegal entry into the United States along the Southwest border," John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said during the briefing, according to the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.

The Associated Press is reporting that the area around Tucson is seeing a record number of deaths of border crossers this month. As of July 16, 40 bodies of undocumented immigrants trying to cross the border were brought to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. At the current rate, the number of deaths could top the record of 68 in July 2005.

Kristi Eaton is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She graduated from Arizone State University in 2008.