American Civil Liberties Union

The full U. S. Senate took up the potentially historic bill to overhaul the country's immigration system last week.

At the top of the week, things looked rosy. S. 744 flew through initial procedural hurdles to allowing the chamber to take up the bill, with rare flying colors. This might have led to a surge in optimism about the bill, especially given the heady tone of the markup sessions in the Senate Judiciary Committee just two weeks earlier.

Today Maryland and Oregon are celebrating the signing of new laws expanding access to driver's licenses to all residents, including undocumented immigrants. We are part of a movement. Our hope is that our success inspires the passage of bills in more than a dozen other states considering similar measures.

In most states today, it is difficult, if not impossible, for people to go about their daily lives without the ability to drive. Simple but essential tasks such as driving kids to school or to extracurricular activities, picking up groceries, going to the doctor, and traveling to workbecome riddled with hardship. As a result, people without access to driver's licenses are faced with the difficult "choice" of either not meeting their basic needs or driving and risking arrest and other negative repercussions.

The immigration reform bill that has emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee is good – not ideal, not awful, but good. It is a game changer for those who currently have no hope of realizing the Constitution's promise of equal protection. But it also creates real risks to privacy for all Americans regardless of status and expands the kind of database environment that many of us fear will give the government access to far too broad a swath of our lives. And the bill creates the kind of militarized environment along our southern border that is extremely costly, harmful to border communities' quality of life, and enormously inefficient. And we must not forget that some are wrongly excluded from even a chance at the fruits of immigration reform – beginning with those who happen to love someone of the same sex.

Plaintiffs have established that the MCSO had sufficient intent to discriminate against Latino occupants of motor vehicles. Further, the Court concludes that the MCSO had and continues to have a facially discriminatory policy of considering Hispanic appearance probative of whether a person is legally present in the country in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The MCSO is thus permanently enjoined from using race, or allowing its deputies and other agents to use race as a criteria in making law enforcement decisions with respect to Latino occupants of vehicles in Maricopa County.