Arizona Passes Measure to Arrest Immigrants Who Enter US Illegally

A group sits in front of the Tucson, Arizona, section of the US-Mexico border fence.Matt York/AP

Arizona voters passed Proposition 314, a measure that will allow state and local police to arrest people crossing the US border outside ports of entry and empower state judges to order deportations. The ballot measure passed with just over 62 percent of the vote. Advocates, including the ACLU of Arizona and the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, have harshly condemned the measure, warning that it would open the door for racial profiling and harassment for people of color living in Arizona.

The law will likely face challenges, as immigration enforcement is a federal power, and similar state laws have been struck down in the past.

Arizona is no stranger to constitutionally questionable immigration laws. In 2012, the US Supreme Court struck down most of Senate Bill 1070, which made it illegal to be undocumented in the state, ruling that states don’t have the power to punish people for being in the country without documentation.  

In Texas, a similar bill that sought to allow police to arrest people crossing the US-Mexico border outside ports of entry into the state has been repeatedly blocked from going into effect because of legal challenges from the Justice Department and immigration advocacy groups that say the law infringes on the federal government’s sole authority over immigration.

The Arizona and Texas measures are part of a growing number of anti-immigrant proposals from Republican state lawmakers nationwide. The League of United Latin American Citizens—one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country—found that state lawmakers had already proposed 233 anti-immigrant bills over a month before Election Day, more than four times the total number from 2020.