No thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, Arizona's law to keep criminal aliens behind bars has won in federal court. At the bull's eye of a failed legal strategem stands the lawman the open-borders crowd loves to hate, Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The law came about through a 2006 referendum, Proposition 100. Arizonans approved the measure to keep illegal aliens charged with felonies from having the option of gaining release on bail. To no one's surprise, posting bail had become a loophole the illegals exploited.
Sheriff Arpaio described the situation: "Proposition 100 was crafted to deal with an ongoing problem – illegal aliens committing serious felonies and using the courts as a revolving door to escape justice by skipping out after getting a far too lenient bail."
Of course, the ACLU sued Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County Attorney to halt the popularly adopted law. (Sound familiar?) Ironically, the same federal judge, Susan Bolton, who ruled favorably in this case iced key provisions of Arizona's S.B. 1070 last year. The judge rejected this case's plaintiffs' claims that the law is unconstitutional, violates criminal illegal aliens' "rights", and that the sheriff and county harshly carried out the law's enforcement.
As the victim of unjust and unjustified legal attacks including by the U.S. Justice Department, Sheriff Arpaio predicted this case's outcome is a harbinger of other good legal rulings: "I firmly believe we will be equally successful in the other lawsuits we are defending. When all of those are resolved, I'm sure we will be exonerated of all charges of racial profiling, depriving people of constitutional rights and all the other claims of wrong doing."
The ruling carves another notch in the belt of state and local action to deal with immigration's adverse consequences as they play out locally. And for the record, Prop 100 won in a landslide: 78 percent of voters supported it.
