American Civil Liberties Union

What do anti-immigrant laws have to do with children and youth?

In my 8-year-old son Cyrus's Spanish immersion program at a Berkeley public school, there are families facing deportation. The teacher taught a class on it and the children wrote letters to President Obama, in Cyrus' words, "to keep families together."

So when I told Cyrus I was going on a long road trip to fight discriminatory anti-immigrant laws, he said "Do it, Baba." And with his vote of approval, off I went.

Today we let federal lawmakers know that Arizona’s racial profiling law, S.B. 1070, is about much more than just the state of Arizona and its immigrants. It’s about how we see ourselves as a nation.

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character finds himself repeating the same miserable day over and over again. For Indian film star Shahrukh Khan, last week was Groundhog Day for racial and religious profiling. In 2009, Khan — a huge global celebrity whose likeness is immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud's — was traveling to the United States to celebrate Indian independence day and to promote a movie about a Muslim man who is the victim of profiling called My Name is Khan. In a case of life imitating art, Khan who is also Muslim, was detained and questioned at Newark airport.

This week, Wednesday is a big day for immigrants' rights advocates: The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Arizona v. United States, the Justice Department's challenge to S.B. 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law. The ACLU will be participating in two briefings today and tomorrow, and will be attending the argument.