White Federal judge upholds motorist provision of South Carolina immigration law - Non-Whites Can be Detained on Side of Road while Police Check Status

From [HERE] and [HERE] A judge for the US District Court for the District of South Carolina on Thursday upheld [order, PDF] a provision of South Carolina's controversial immigration law [SB 20, materials] that permits law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of motorists. Judge Richard Gergel (in photo), who is a white man, ruled that he would still prevent certain parts of the immigration law from taking effect. Gergel heard arguments Tuesday on the part of South Carolina's controversial immigration law that permits law enforcement officials to detain motorists on the side of the road for a "reasonable amount of time" while the officer checks the driver's immigration status. During arguments, Gergel asserted that 90 minutes is too long to detain a vehicle, but that 38 minutes could be considered reasonable and may not violate the constitutional protections against unlawful searches and seizures conferred by the Fourth Amendment .

Similar to Arizona's "show me your papers" law, the SC law cannot be enforced without racially targeting persons perceived by officers to be undocumented (all non-white persons or specifically, people with brown/black skin and/or an accent or any other stereotypical characteristic the officer has been indoctrinated with) in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. This provision of SB 20 is an unconstitutional “stop-and-identify” law that converts detentions into de facto arrests where officers rely on hunches and other impermissible factors in assuming that a person is in the country illegally.

In July Gergel declined to lift an injunction against the law despite the recent US Supreme Court decision striking down most of the model Arizona immigration law [SB 1070, PDF; JURIST news archive]. Gergel blocked provisions of the law [JURIST report] from being enforced in December. The lawsuit against the South Carolina immigration law was put on hold [JURIST report] in January pending the outcome of Arizona v. United States. South Carolina is one of five states, including Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Utah [JURIST reports] that modeled their recent immigration laws after Arizona's controversial SB 1070. Following the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. United States [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] in June, lower courts have handed down a variety of rulings.