DOJ Colluded with ACLU Against Arizona

By James R. Edwards, Jr. on February 2, 2011

That foul smell isn't emanating from Denmark (apologies to Shakespeare). No, the stench comes from the Obama Department of Justice.

What is supposed to be the nation's apolitical top law enforcement agency protecting the rights of Americans, the U.S. Department of Justice, has been exposed for colluding with the most left-wing legal organization in the country, the falsely named American Civil Liberties Union.

The legal watchdog group, Judicial Watch, has made public documents it forced into the open through the Freedom of Information Act. Those Justice Department documents prove that DOJ and the ACLU closely cooperated in legal strategies against the state of Arizona. Not only that, but the documents evidence that the U.S. Justice Department worked in close cooperation with the government of Mexico to overturn the duly adopted law of a U.S. state.

Both the administration, via DOJ, and the ACLU (along with a slew of open-borders advocacy and ethnic identity politics groups) sued Arizona over its S.B. 1070. That state law sought to exercise Arizona's inherent authority to deal as it sees fit with exigencies arising from runaway illegal immigration, cartel warfare, and human trafficking.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, captured the essence of the problem this exposes: "It is one thing to share the ACLU's disrespect for the rule of law but it is quite another to collude with the organization on a prosecutorial strategy against the State of Arizona. Frankly, these new documents show it is hard to tell where the ACLU ends and the Justice Department begins."

There's good reason that the line between the two is so blurry in this case. Monica Ramirez, the counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at Justice and whose name appears in many of the disclosed e-mails, came from the ACLU. She's the DOJ person who collected all the opposition materials, including from the National Immigration Law Center and the Mexican embassy.