Justices to Rule on Role of the States in Immigration

When Georgia passed a law last year authorizing the local police to question and detain illegal immigrants, Darvin Eason felt the impact immediately on his farms here in south Georgia.

At the peak of the harvest, many of the Mexican workers he had relied on to pick his blackberries were scared away from the state. Ripe berries fell to the ground uncollected, and Mr. Eason lost $20,000 — even though the sections of the law that struck fear in the immigrants had been suspended by federal courts.

So Mr. Eason is one of many people across the country who will be watching closely when the Supreme Court hears arguments on Wednesday on the bitterly disputed immigration enforcement law that was passed two years ago in Arizona, inspiring the Georgia statute and similar ones in Alabama, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah.

Arizona’s law, known as SB 1070, expanded the powers of state police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop, and to hold those suspected of being illegal immigrants. The law was challenged by the Obama administration, and four of its most contentious provisions were suspended by federal courts. Courts later temporarily blocked other state laws, including the one in Georgia.

Constitutional lawyers on both sides of the argument say the case raises fundamental questions about federal powers. With the strong conservative bent the court has shown this session, a distinct possibility has emerged that the justices could uphold at least some of the Arizona law’s contested sections, going against the trend in the lower courts on the core legal issues.

The Arizona case, lawyers said, could lead the Supreme Court to redraw long-established boundaries between the federal government and the states when it comes to immigration enforcement, which has been considered a nearly exclusive federal preserve.

If the court endorses any part of Arizona’s approach, it would provide a big lift to groups that campaign against illegal immigration, which have clamored for tough action by states, saying the federal government has failed to do its part. It could rekindle political battles in state legislatures, including in Georgia, where support for Arizona-style laws had begun to fade in the wake of unanticipated consequences like those Mr. Eason and other Georgia farmers faced.

The central issue in the arguments the court will hear is the Obama administration’s contention that Arizona’s police provisions encroached disruptively on federal terrain.

“Arizona has adopted its own immigration policy, which focuses solely on maximum enforcement and pays no heed to the multifaceted judgments” that immigration law provides for the executive branch to make, the Obama administration wrote in its brief.

Lucas Guttentag, a law professor teaching at Stanford who was the top immigrants’ rights lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has participated in challenges to statutes in Arizona and other states, said that “in many respects, this is a defining moment for the court on whether a historic line will be breached.”

“Will immigration law continue to be governed by national interest,” he said, “or will the court allow every state and locality to intrude in immigration policy and assert local biases and prejudices?”

Arizona’s supporters say the state is well within its rights to enact a measure that they say would help, not hinder, federal agents. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that seeks reduced immigration, accused the Obama administration of trying to seize power from the states, calling its lawsuit “a bald-faced usurpation of the American people’s right to decide who comes and who goes in our country.” Mr. Stein’s group assisted Arizona in writing its law.

Immigrant and Latino groups have assailed SB 1070, saying it would unleash a wave of discriminatory arrests. Those civil rights issues are not directly before the Supreme Court in the current case. But if the justices strike down the Arizona law, it would be a powerful victory for those groups. Aside from the five states that enacted police laws similar to Arizona’s, at least eight additional states weighed such legislation but did not move forward, with many awaiting the outcome in the Supreme Court.

But even if the court widens the way for immigration action by states, the negative fallout that followed Arizona-style policing laws has made many lawmakers cautious.