Georgia’s HB 87 Suit

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The National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Asian Law Caucus and a coalition of other civil rights groups filed a class action lawsuit [pdf] yesterday challenging Georgia’s discriminatory anti-immigrant law passed last month and inspired by Arizona’s notorious SB 1070. The Georgia law authorizes police to demand “papers” demonstrating citizenship or immigration status during traffic stops, criminalizes Georgians who interact daily with undocumented individuals, and makes it unjustifiably difficult for individuals without specific identification documents to access state facilities and services.

In the meantime, farmers face a significant labor shortage:

The lawsuit charges that the extreme law endangers public safety, invites the racial profiling of Latinos, Asians and others who appear foreign to an officer, and interferes with federal law.

Georgia is the third state to have enacted laws emulating Arizona’s controversial and costly SB 1070, even though the Arizona law was blocked by the courts. Utah and Indiana passed similar laws earlier this year. After an ACLU and NILC lawsuit, a federal district court last month put Utah’s law on hold pending further review. The ACLU and NILC also filed a legal challenge to Indiana’s law.

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