First Arrest Under Alabama's New Immigration Law Is... LEGAL

October 5, 2011 by Left in Alabama

Whoopsie!

Before I begin...  My Firefox crashed last night, and I lost several good links to the below information, so please excuse the lack of them.  If I can dig them back up, I will be happy to edit this later.

Ettowah County police had a drug raid over the weekend looking for "spice" and "bath salts".  (Don't get me started on that one.)  There were three men involved.  Two were able to produce their documentation immediately, proving they were here legally.  The third apparently left his wallet at home.  So the cops took him in on obstruction of justice and waited the weekend to see if he could produce his papers.

What happened next is too good for anyone opposing the new law to make up.

Alabama politicians who support the new law, in a crazy effort to prove that the new law isn't racist and works beyond causing long lines at courthouses and turning Alabama into a police state, decided to jump on the opportunity that the first man arrested under the new law was from Yemen and was not Latino.  This arresting of a man who was not Latino (even though he was still non-white) was somehow supposed to "prove" that the law wasn't racist, because for some reason racism only counts if it's against Latinos.  (Don't ask.  I don't understand the reasoning, either.)

Supporters all over the Internet posted this to Facebook and pro-law websites so that they could gloat over how wonderfully the new law was working and how non-racist they were.

For months, America has been told by left-wing non-profits like the Alien Criminals Liberation Union (ACLU), La Raza and LULAC, that Alabama’s new immigration law H.B. 56,  “targets Hispanics” and is “anti-Latino“... 

Well, the very first such arrest has now occurred since the Judge’s ruling. And – surprise, he  is not from Mexico, or any other Latino American nation.  He is Mohamed Ali Muflahi, 24, from…Yemen!

Yeah, that totally counts as not racist, guys, because he's totally not Mexican even though he's not white!  Keep it up!

GOP politicians scrambled to point out how wonderful their new law was all over Twitter.  Some decided to write a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to tell him to back off.

After learning of the arrest, several Alabama state senators drafted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder demanding the Justice Department drop its legal challenges to the state's immigration law. 

...The letter requests that Holder launch an investigation into how a citizen of Yemen settled in Alabama without detection or documentation.

Yemen is "a growing hotbed of Islamic radicalism and an operating base for the al-Qaeda terrorist network," state senator Bryan Taylor's office said.

But then something odd happened... 

The letter was set to be released to the media Tuesday morning, but the news conference was cancelled for unspecified reasons.

Why on earth would they do that?

Well, as it turns out, their much-touted "first arrest" (more on that in a bit) who happened to still be non-white turned out to have documentation after all and was held for three days over next to nothing. (Obstruction, the charge they held him on, has a rather interesting reputation as being the thing you'll be charged with if they have nothing on you.)

So basically, all those opponents saying that this law was a great way to violate the constitutional rights of non-whites who were here legally...  Well those people just got proven right.  I suppose I'd be laying low, too.

Hilarity then ensued, folks.

Before you knew it, the story was getting buried along with the original announcements.  (Just go ahead and see how many MSM reports you can find on a story they should be jumping all over.  Sure, you can find a few.  But you're not going to find them easily, and you won't find many.)  The right-wing spin machine went to work.  This of course wasn't an actual arrest under the immigration law (even though that's exactly what they said it was only hours earlier). This was of course just a guy who got arrested and would have been arrested and held anyway (even though he was released immediately upon producing his papers).  And the fact that he was released upon showing his papers just proves that the law is working as intended (except that "working as intended" still means that anyone can be arrested and held for days for leaving their wallet at home).

The folks who had just posted to sites like Free Republic and other forums and stated mere hours ago that the law was working so well either got really quiet all of a sudden upon hearing the news or quickly turned the argument around to the above.  Watching this happen was the most delicious form of Schadenfreude that an opponent could taste, and it went well with Diet Coke.

If you'll remember a post from a few days ago, Eric Fleischauer wrote an entry in which he mentioned that Judge Sharon Blackburn stated that while police could in fact check legal status that they probably shouldn't detain anyone for longer than they would have otherwise been detained under the original other circumstances.  As it was put then, she gave the state just enough rope on Section12.  And Ettowah County might have just hung them on it.

This wasn't the first arrest under the new law.  In fact, even the Ettowah County sheriff has since stated that they have made other arrests-- albeit he made this statement after the update on this story.  He's not giving details, and I'm pretty sure it's because those people are Latino.

So are they now going to harp on the multitudes of Hispanics they've started detaining?  Probably not.  They still REALLY want to prove that they're not being racist, after all.

What you can expect:  If you're white, you're SOL.  At this point, if they want to prove they're not racist, they're going to have to start stopping everyone at any time.  And if they're lucky, they might get a white person to parade in front of news cameras.