States can impose their own stiff penalties on illegal immigrants and others who steal identities to get jobs, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, upholding Arizona’s law and dealing a setback to immigrant rights advocates.
The decision is yet another victory for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and more broadly for Arizona, which has been a pioneer in trying to find ways to punish illegal immigrants, stepping into a void left by the Bush and Obama administrations.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there are still some questions about how police and prosecutors use the identity theft laws, but on their face they do not violate the Constitution nor trample on the federal government’s ability to set national immigration laws.
As long as the laws apply to anyone, including U.S. citizens who steal others’ identities, they are allowed — even if the legislature intended them chiefly as a way to strike at one of the symptoms of illegal immigration, the judges said.
“In this case, Arizona exercised its police powers to pass criminal laws that apply equally to unauthorized aliens, authorized aliens, and U.S. citizens,” Circuit Court Judge Richard C. Tallman wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Just because some applications of those laws implicate federal immigration priorities does not mean that the statute as a whole should be struck down.”
The identity theft law was one of a series of changes Arizona enacted over the past decade to try to put pressure on illegal immigrants.
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