The Arizona Daily Star set out to investigate the impact of SB 1070’s so-called “show me your papers” provision, which requires law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they stop and then suspect is not authorized to be in this country.
A team of reporters collected thousands of records from 13 Southern Arizona law enforcement agencies to see how often and under what circumstances local police called the Border Patrol.
The Star’s analysis of Arizona’s controversial immigration law revealed a patchwork of enforcement policies and data so incomplete it is impossible to determine whether police are fully implementing the law, let alone whether they are carrying it out without committing the widespread civil-rights violations that activists feared.
