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In 2012, in
Arizona v. United States , the Supreme Court affirmed federal supremacy on immigration.
Arizona v. United States , 567 U.S. __ (2012). The court struck down three of the four central provisions of the Arizona law—namely, those allowing police officers to arrest an undocumented immigrant without a warrant if they had probable cause to think he or she had committed a crime that could lead to deportation, making it a crime to seek a job without proper immigration papers, and making it a crime to be in Arizona without valid immigration papers. The court upheld the “show me your papers” provision, which authorizes police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest who they suspect is an illegal immigrant.
Arizona v. United States , 567 U.S. __ (2012). However, in letting this provision stand, the court warned Arizona and other states with similar laws that they could face civil rights lawsuits if police officers applied it based on racial profiling.
Julia Preston, “Arizona Ruling Only a Narrow Opening for Other States,”
New York Times , 25 June 2012. All in all, Justice Anthony
Kennedy ’s opinion embraced an expansive view of the U.S. government’s authority to regulate immigration and aliens, describing it as broad and undoubted. That authority derived from the legislative power of Congress to “establish a uniform
Rule of Naturalization ,” enumerated in the Constitution.
Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 has been the subject of heated debate. Read the views of proponents and opponents of the law.
Marital rights for gays and lesbians have also significantly changed in recent years. By passing the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, the federal government stepped into this policy issue. Not only did DOMA allow states to choose whether to recognize same-sex marriages, it also defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which meant that same-sex couples were denied various federal provisions and benefits—such as the right to file joint tax returns and receive Social Security survivor benefits. In 1997, more than half the states in the union had passed some form of legislation banning same-sex marriage. By 2006, two years after Massachusetts became the first state to recognize marriage equality, twenty-seven states had passed constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. In
United States v. Windsor , the Supreme Court changed the dynamic established by DOMA by ruling that the federal government had no authority to define marriage. The Court held that states possess the “historic and essential authority to define the marital relation,” and that the federal government’s involvement in this area “departs from this history and tradition of reliance on state law to define marriage.”
United States v. Windsor , 570 U.S. __ (2013).
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