Arizona's immigration law Is Unconstitutional, Class Claims

PHOENIX Arizona’s controversial immigration law “will cause widespread racial profiling and will subject many persons of color … to unlawful interrogations, searches, seizures and arrests,” according to a federal class action filed by the ACLU, the NAACP and other national civil rights groups.

The new law requires local police to enforce immigration laws and allows them to search vehicles without a warrant if an officer has a reasonable suspicion that the occupants don’t have immigration papers.

The groups want the court to block Arizona Senate Bill 1070, signed by Gov. Janice Brewer on April 23, from going into effect on July 28.They say the law is unconstitutional and “will create a legal regime regulating and restricting immigration and punishing those whom Arizona deems to be in violation of immigration laws.”

The law will also “cause widespread racial profiling and will subject many persons of color — including countless U.S. citizens, and non-citizens who have federal permission to remain in the United States — to unlawful interrogations, searches, seizures and arrests,” the groups claim.

The plaintiffs include the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Coalicíon De Derechos Humanos, the Muslim American Society, and the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

The Muslim American Society claims that its members, some of whom are immigrants, will be racially profiled “based on their foreign appearance and clothing, such as headscarves.” It also claims it won’t be able to educate the Muslim community in Arizona because its members “will be too afraid to attend meetings and organized activities and events.”
Jesus Cuauhtémoc Villa, a New Mexico resident and an Arizona State University anthropology student, claims that he may be subject to arrest because as a New Mexico resident he was not required to have proof of U.S. citizenship or immigration status to get a driver’s license. Villa claims he does not have a U.S. passport and does not want to risk losing his birth certificate by carrying it with him.

The plaintiffs say the Arizona immigration law “cannot be enforced without improperly singling out racial and ethnic minorities, including many U.S. citizens and persons authorized by the federal government to be present in the U.S., for stops, interrogations, arrests, and detentions.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio allegedly uses training materials stating that “the fact that an individual has no English skills or speaks English poorly is a factor indicating that an individual is not ‘lawfully present’ in the United States.”

The civil rights organizations demand a declaration that the Arizona immigration law is unconstitutional and an order blocking its enforcement. This is the fifth lawsuit filed against the Arizona immigration law in Federal Court.
The class is represented by Anne Lai of the ACLU Foundation of Arizona. (CN)

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to "JihadJane," her Internet alias

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to “JihadJane,” her Internet alias, was unique in many ways, but a common thread ties the alleged Islamic militant to other recent cases of homegrown terrorism: the Internet.

From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism.”LaRose showed that you can become a terrorist in the comfort of your own bedroom,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies at Georgetown University. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”

“The new militancy is driven by the Web,” agreed Fawaz A. Gerges, a terrorism expert at the London School of Economics. “The terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being replaced by virtual camps on the Web.”

From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.

The FBI arrested LaRose in October after she had spent months using e-mail, YouTube, MySpace and electronic message boards to recruit radicals in Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to a federal indictment unsealed this week.That put the strawberry-haired Pennsylvania resident in league with many of the 12 domestic terrorism cases involving Muslims that the FBI disclosed last year, the most in any year since 2001. The Internet was cited as a recruiting or radicalizing tool in nearly every case.

“Basically, Al Qaeda isn’t coming to them,” Gerges said. “They are using the Web to go to Al Qaeda.”

In December, for example, five young men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of seeking to join anti-American militants in Afghanistan.A Taliban recruiter made contact with the group after one of the five, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, posted comments on YouTube praising videos of attacks on U.S. troops, officials said. To avoid detection, they communicated by leaving draft e-mail messages at a shared Yahoo e-mail address.

Hosam Smadi, a Jordanian, was arrested in September and accused of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction after he allegedly tried to blow up a 60-story office tower in downtown Dallas. The FBI began surveillance of Smadi after seeing his anti-American postings on an extremist website.And Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed, two middle-class kids barely out of high school near Atlanta, secretly took up violent jihad after meeting at a mosque.

“They started spending hours online — chatting with each other, watching terrorist recruitment videos, and meeting like-minded extremists,” the FBI said in a statement after the pair were convicted of terrorism charges in December.

Prosecutors alleged that the pair traveled to Washington and made more than 60 short surveillance videos of the Capitol, the Pentagon and other sensitive facilities, and e-mailed them to an Al Qaeda webmaster and propagandist.

U.S. authorities also closely monitor several fiery Internet imans who use English to preach jihad and, in some cases, to help funnel recruits to Al Qaeda and other radical causes.The best known is Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born imam who is believed to be living in Yemen. U.S. officials say more than 10% of visitors to his website are in the U.S.

Among those who traded e-mails with Awlaki were Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with shooting and killing 13 people in November at Ft. Hood, Texas, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day.

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the MAS Freedom Foundation, part of the Muslim American Society, noted that many extremist websites featured fiery images, loud music and fast-moving videos of violence and death.”They use video games and hip-hop to bring young people in, sometimes in very benign ways,” he said. “Then they make this transition by showing all the horrific things” and by then, some would-be recruits are hooked.

Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said his group had struggled to compete with the instant attention that grisly videos of beheadings, roadside bombs or masked men with weapons draw on the Internet.”They get the backdrop of the Afghani mountains or the battlefields of Somalia,” he said. “We’re speaking from conference centers and quiet halls. Somehow, we have to figure out a way to make our message more newsworthy. We’ve issued YouTube videos, and it barely gets a couple of hundred hits.”