ACLU: Tucson Police Violating Rights During Immigration Checks

May 02, 2016

A civil rights group says the Tucson Police Department is holding people at traffic stops longer than it should in order to check their immigration status. The complaints stem from the city’s enforcing a slice of Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070.

A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it reviewed 110 traffic stops by the Tucson Police Department. In 85 of those, officers held people for longer than a routine traffic stop should take. Immigration statuses were checked, and sometimes the Border Patrol was called in. The ACLU says as a result, those stopped were held longer than they should have been.

"In many cases, Tucson PD was explicit about the fact that they were extending the stops solely to wait for Border Patrol to arrive," said ACLU attorney James Lyall. "In some cases, passengers were detained without any probable cause of criminal wrongdoing and in some cases, driven to meet the Border Patrol in order to transfer custody."

The immigration enforcement is a provision of Arizona’s SB 1070 law. It requires officers to check the immigration status of anyone they stop if the officer suspects the person is in the United States illegally. The ACLU claims that Tucson officers go far beyond what that provision allows. In some cases, people were detained as long as three hours. In others, people were held for more than an hour before Border Patrol agents determined they were actually U.S. citizens. Lyall acknowledged that there’s no hard and fast rule on how long a traffic stop should take. But he points out a Supreme Court case from last year where the court ruled that even a seven-minute delay over the time the officer needed to make the stop was unconstitutional.

"The result is a lot of people’s civil rights are being violated," he said.

The data on the lengthy traffic stops was collected within the tenure of the city’s former police chief, Roberto Villasenor.

The current chief, Christopher Magnus, sent a statement Monday afternoon that he already had planned to meet with the ACLU next week to discuss the issue.

"I received a copy of a letter from the ACLU dated May 2, 2016, regarding our department's enforcement of SB 1070. I plan to give thoughtful consideration to the issues raised in the letter with an eye toward identifying any opportunities to improve our training, policies, and practices," said Magnus. "Information in the ACLU letter will be of value in our evolving efforts to retain and further strengthen a trusting relationship with all members of the community, as we endeavor to fairly enforce the law. I look forward to a previously set meeting with ACLU staff and community members next week to discuss our efforts moving forward."

Two years ago, Councilwoman Regina Romero was among those who pressed Tucson police to adopt an electronic system to detail traffic stops specifically because of SB 1070’s enforcement provision.

"The stop data is not only there to use by groups to take these issues back to the Supreme Court and say look we told you it was going to have disparate impact on minority Latinos in the state of Arizona but the stop data is also there for the chief to make sure that he’s looking at the data and he’s asking questions as to why," she said.

The ACLU’s criticism also extends to the Obama Administration for using the Border Patrol to assist Tucson police in its enforcement of SB 1070.