Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Photo: Flickr/The National Guard)

Former members of a task force on Secure Communities sent a letter this week to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano calling on her to suspend the immigration enforcement program.

The letter also expressed their concern that an Arizona law enforcement agency that has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations” still has access to Secure Communities.

Brittney Nystrom of the National Immigration Forum and Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto of the AFL-CIO write in the letter:

As former members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, Task Force on Secure Communities, we note with concern the multiple findings of racial profiling of Latinos and other civil rights violations by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on December 15.

The findings of a pattern and practice of racial profiling of Latinos in Maricopa County, Arizona, demonstrate that abuse can occur while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively collaborating with enforcement agencies through both the 287(g) program and the Secure Communities program and through informal collaboration between DHS and law enforcement agencies.

“My understanding is that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is continuing to operate Secure Communities in Maricopa County despite the findings of discriminatory policing by that sheriffs department,” Nystrom tells The Florida Independent.

Secure Communities allows local law enforcement agencies to check the fingerprints of people they detain and match them up with federal immigration and criminal databases, with the stated goal of deporting undocumented immigrant criminals. All 67 Florida jurisdictions participate in Secure Communities.

Napolitano said in October that the termination of Secure Communities “would only weaken public safety, and move the immigration enforcement system back towards the ad hoc approach where non-criminal aliens are more likely to be removed than criminals.”

Opponents of Secure Communities have repeatedly called on the Obama administration to end the fingerprint-sharing program because immigrants who have committed no crime are being detained and deported, leaving behind U.S.-born children and families that, in many cases, will struggle to make ends meet.

Nystrom says that Homeland Security officials said they were “limiting” the Maricopa sheriff’s office’s “access to Secure Communities, but that in [her] thinking and Andrea’s thinking doesn’t go far enough to prevent someone who was picked up in a biased manner from being put into the deportation machine.”

The letter adds that the Secure Communities termination should also include Alabama, “where immigration enforcement laws that have been challenged as unconstitutional by the Department of Justice are in effect.”

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The tea party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

A federal report released Thursday finds that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Associated Press reports:

The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release, is a result of the U.S. Justice Department’s three-year investigation of Arpaio’s office amid complaints of racial profiling and a culture of bias at the agency’s top level.

The AP adds that federal authorities will continue to investigate, among other complaints, “a large number of sex-crimes cases that were assigned to” Arpaio’s office “but weren’t followed up on or investigated at all.”

In a press release issued Thursday, the Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office found “reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”

The department found

a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including:

• Discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos;
• Unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices, including but not limited to practices relating to its discriminatory treatment of Latinos; and
• Discriminatory jail practices against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency by punishing them and denying them critical services.

Arpaio has said he trains his deputies with federal immigration officials, has the largest group of cross-certified law enforcement men and women (160 of them) and proudly talks about his “tent city,” where about 2,000 detainees live “in Korean War tents” and “sleep in bunk beds, 20 to a tent.”

Asked what he would do if the Supreme Court decides to strike down Arizona’s immigration enforcement law S.B. 1070, Arapio said on CNN this week:

It doesn’t change anything. I do like certain parts of that new law, but I’ll tell you one thing, we’ve been doing it under two other state laws. We have two other state laws, one is the employer sanction that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor. So, it’s not going to change anything I’m doing, regardless of what that decision is.

Arapaio endorsed GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry in late November, saying Perry “has done more to combat illegal immigration and secure the border than any other candidate in the Republican presidential field.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (Photo: Flickr/ryanjreilly)

During a speech given in Texas last night, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder criticized legal challenges launched by states — including Florida — against the section of the Voting Rights Act that requires approval of election laws in certain areas. Holder also affirmed the need for vigilance against laws aimed at rolling back voting rights.

According to a draft of his speech released to the press, Holder also said that he was taking a “thorough” look into Florida’s controversial new elections law.

“We’re also examining a number of changes that Florida has made to its electoral process,” he said, “including changes to the procedures governing third-party voter registration organizations, as well as changes to early voting procedures, including the number of days in the early voting period.”

“Although I cannot go into detail about the ongoing review of these and other state-law changes,” he continued, “I can assure you that it will be thorough — and fair. We will examine the facts, and we will apply the law. If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and approve the change. And where a state can’t meet this burden, we will object as part of our obligation under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

Florida has not been the only state facing scrutiny from the federal government. Holder also mentioned interest in other states such as Texas and South Carolina. Both states were among several that enacted new photo ID requirements to vote.

Holder said during his speech (according to the prepared remarks):

Despite this history, and despite our nation’s long tradition of extending voting rights – to non-property owners and women, to people of color and Native Americans, and to younger Americans – today, a growing number of our fellow citizens are worried about the same disparities, divisions, and problems that – nearly five decades ago – LBJ devoted his Presidency to addressing. In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from many Americans, who – often for the first time in their lives – now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble, and essential, ideals.

As Congressman John Lewis described it, in a speech on the House floor this summer, the voting rights that he worked throughout his life – and nearly gave his life – to ensure are, “under attack… [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent concerns about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.

Since January, more than a dozen states have advanced new voting measures. Some of these new laws are currently under review by the Justice Department, based on our obligations under the Voting Rights Act.

Holder also spoke about recent challenges to the Voting Rights Act, specifically the section of the law that requires federal “preclearance” of election laws in certain areas. In October, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning launched a legal complaint against that requirement.

In his filing, Browing argued that federal preclearance requirements for state election laws are “unconstitutional” and that “subjecting Florida counties and other jurisdictions covered exclusively under the language minority provisions of the [Voting Rights Act] to pre-clearance is not a rational, congruent, or proportional means of enforcing the Fourteenth and/or Fifteenth Amendments and violates the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the U.S. Constitution.”

Last night, Holder said:

Despite the long history of support for Section 5, this keystone of our voting rights laws is now being challenged five years after its reauthorization as unconstitutional in no fewer than five lawsuits. Each of these lawsuits claims that we’ve attained a new era of electoral equality, that America in 2011 has moved beyond the challenges of 1965, and that Section 5 is no longer necessary.

I wish this were the case. The reality is that – in jurisdictions across the country – both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common. And we don’t have to look far to see recent proof.

Holder described recent problems with Texas and Louisiana’s redistricting efforts, which he said “failed to show the absence of discrimination.” Holder said, “To those who argue that Section 5 is no longer necessary — these and other examples are proof that we still need this critical tool to combat discrimination and safeguard the right to vote.”

The attorney general also announced that the issue of protecting voting rights in the country was a moral imperative that required public support.

“As concerns about the protection of this right and the integrity of our election systems become an increasingly prominent part of our national dialogue, we must consider some important questions,” he said. “It is time to ask: What kind of nation — and what kind of people — do we want to be? Are we willing to allow this era — our era — to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended? Are we willing to allow this time — our time — to be recorded in history as the age when the long-held belief that, in this country, every citizen has the chance — and the right — to help shape their government, became a relic of our past, instead of a guidepost for our future?”

Holder said new legislation that was formerly introduced in the Senate by then-Sen. Barack Obama, would be reintroduced by Sens. Charles Schumer and Ben Cardin. The law “would establish tough criminal penalties for those who engage in fraudulent voting practices — and would help to ensure that citizens have complete and accurate information about where and when to vote,” he said.

“Despite so many decades of struggle, sacrifice, and achievement — we must remain ever vigilant in safeguarding our most basic and important right,” he concluded. “Too many recent actions have the potential to reverse the progress that defines us — and has made this nation exceptional, as well as an example for all the world. We must be true to the arc of America’s history, which compels us to be more inclusive with regard to the franchise. And we must never forget the purpose that — more than two centuries ago — inspired our nation’s founding, and now must guide us forward.”

The Supreme Court of the United States Blog wrote Monday: “Adding further to the historic rank of the Supreme Court’s current Term, the Justices on Monday took on the searing constitutional — and political — controversy over state power to strictly limit the way undocumented immigrants live their lives in the U.S.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) “welcomes the decision by the United States Supreme Court to review Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, SB 1070.” The group not only welcomed S.B. 1070 but also helped draft the law through its affiliate — the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

FAIR, according to Open Secrets, spent more than $3.4 million from 1998 through 2011 to lobby Congress on immigration-related legislation, like a proposed House GOP sponsored resolution that “would have prohibited the U.S. Department of Justice from using any funds to sue Arizona in an effort to strike down its new immigration enforcement law, SB 1070.”

“We believe that SB 1070 is a legitimate effort by a state to partner with the federal government in assisting in the enforcement of our immigration laws,” said FAIR President Dan Stein.

The National Immigration Forum wrote Monday: “We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will clarify once and for all that only the federal government has the authority to create and enforce immigration law. We believe Arizona’s SB1070 is misguided and unconstitutional and expect the Supreme Court to use this opportunity to slam the brakes on other state-based immigration laws that are in conflict with our Constitution and core American values.”

According to Open Secrets, the Forum has spent more than $1.5 million since 1998 to lobby Congress on issues related to comprehensive immigration reform.

The American Spectator, a publication that “serves as a resource and an outlet for a host of both young and established conservative writers and thinkers” writes today: “Health care reform isn’t the only major policy battle the Obama administration will fight before the Supreme Court. The justices will also hear a case in which the Obama Justice Department asks them to overturn Arizona’s SB 1070, a controversial law empowering state and local police to detain suspected illegal immigrants in the course of their normal work.”

The Spectator, adds:

“We won 5 to 3 on the E-Verify case,” [former Arizona Sen. Russell Pearce, one of the architects of S.B. 1070,] says. “The same issues and constitutional principles are at stake here. I expect we’ll win 5 to 3 again.” (Justice Elena Kagan, the former solicitor general, recused herself in the last case and will do so again in the forthcoming one.) Indeed, the Supreme Court found that Arizona immigration law fell “well within the confines of the authority Congress chose to leave to the States.”

The National Council of La Raza ”hopes that by intervening in this case, the Supreme Court will affirm that the federal government is responsible for immigration enforcement and that states do not have the right to usurp that authority by establishing their own immigration laws.”

La Raza is a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization that according to Open Secrets spent more than $5.6 million to lobby Congress from 1998 through 2011 on immigration, as well as other issues: the federal budget, economic development, education, health issues, housing and law enforcement and crime.

The Supreme Court of the United States Blog added: “The Arizona measure, and one in Alabama that goes even further, were passed by state legislatures with the specific intent of making life so difficult for undocumented aliens that they would choose to leave the state. Other states are also passing similar measures.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (Photo: Flickr/ryanjreilly)

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be giving a speech today about laws recently enacted all over the country that some say will suppress voter turnout among minorities, young people and low-income and disabled voters.

The speech comes during a flurry of activity following restrictive voting laws passed all over the country in the past year. Policymakers in states such as Florida have maintained the laws were crafted to prevent voter fraud.

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature passed an elections law last session that reduces the number of early voting days, creates onerous regulations for third-party voter registration drives and shortens the shelf life for ballot initiative signatures, among other things. A sponsor of the bill has said the bill makes Florida’s elections more “reliable.”

Many groups have denounced the laws, saying the new rules restrict voting rights from minorities and other Democratic-leaning voters as the 2012 election looms. Those complaints are gaining traction at the state and federal level. Yesterday, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., announced that the Senate will commence with field hearings in January in Florida to investigate the effect of the state’s new law. Holder will today give a speech on the same subject.

The Washington Post reports:

With the presidential campaign heating up, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will deliver a speech Tuesday expressing concerns about the voter-identification laws, along with a Texas redistricting plan before the Supreme Court that fails to take into account the state’s burgeoning Hispanic population, he said in an interview Monday.

Holder will speak at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Libary and Museum in Austin, Tex., which honors the president who shepherded the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law.

“We are a better nation now than we were because more people are involved in the electoral process,’’ Holder said in the interview. “The beauty of this nation, the strength of this nation, is its diversity, and when we try to exclude people from being involved in the process . . . we weaken the fabric of this country.’’

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Holder said his department “will be aggressive” in investigating “jurisdictions that have attempted for whatever reason to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls.”

“I think a fundamental question is raised: Who are we as a nation?” Holder said. “Shouldn’t we be coming up with ways to encourage more people to get to the polls to express their views? I am not talking about any one particular state effort, but more generally I think for those who would consider trying to use methods, techniques to discourage people from coming to the polls — that’s inconsistent with what we say we are as a nation.”

The Post reports that “a staff attorney for the ACLU Voting Rights Project … said the Justice Department could reject some laws through the pre-clearance process and file lawsuits seeking to stop others from taking effect.” According to the Post, Holder has already said that “the laws could depress turnout for minorities, poor and elderly people and those with disabilities who would have difficulty securing valid identification documents.”

Florida is currently waiting for a ruling on controversial aspects of its law from a court in the District of Columbia. Five counties in Florida require federal preclearance of voting laws per the Voting Rights Act.

Late last week, national Democrats announced they would be launching a campaign responding to laws across the country that may decrease access to the polls for many for the 2012 election.

U.S. News reports:

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused Republicans of launching a “full-scale attack on the public’s right to vote.” She said that GOP efforts in states to curb instant voter registration and early voting and require photo identification at the polls to fight alleged fraud could push minorities, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, away from voting. She claimed that repeated investigations into voter fraud have found very little evidence that it occurs.

…

The Republican National Committee rejected the charges, however. Officials said there is evidence of voter fraud. In just one popularized case, for example, they note that ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—in 2008 was accused of handling 400,000 fraudulent registrations.

The website, protectingthevote.com, states that “in 2011, a new movement to change the way we vote is under way. Unlike past reforms that sought to expand access to voting, this effort aims to restrict voting purely for partisan gain.”

The website runs through some of the most restrictive new laws in states across the country. The DNC points to laws that “target voter registration drives, cut early voting, repeal election day registration, and create citizen challenges” as the biggest culprits of voter suppression.

The website also has a link to a 73-page report written by the Voting Rights Institute, with help from the DNC. The report singled out Florida as passing some of the most restrictive voting laws, including one law that targets voter-registration drives and another that cuts early voting.

According to the report:

The GOP enacted restrictions on voter registration drives in Florida and Texas, and proposed similar measures in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi. The new legislation in Florida was by far the GOP’s most extensive effort. In 2010, Republican Governor Rick Scott rode a wave of Tea Party support to victory in the state’s gubernatorial race, joining Republican majorities in the Florida House and Senate. A pinnacle of their collaboration in this year’s legislative session was HB1355, a 158-page omnibus elections overhaul that—in addition to early voting cuts—enacted draconian restrictions on all nongovernmental entities that conduct voter registration.

Under HB1355, any group or individual that conducts voter registration must now (1) register their organization with the Florida Division of Elections prior to conducting registration activities and regularly file onerous reports on all their activities; (2) track and account for voter registration forms using a specially generated number for each document; (3) submit completed voter registration forms to the state within 48 hours (a significant decrease from the previous deadline of 10 days); (4) subject themselves to fines between $50 and $1,000 for registration forms returned to the state after 48 hours; and (5) submit to new enforcement authority from the Florida attorney general.

These restrictions encumber even large and experienced organizations; immediately after HB1355 was passed, the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its voter registration activities. But these restrictions fall heaviest on small organizations that conduct neighborhood voter registration, lack the capacity to abide by the state’s reporting requirements and tight deadlines, and could be virtually bankrupted under this penalty structure. Already, there are reports of public school teachers who may face huge fines under the new law—all for the supposed offense of helping students register to vote without following each minute requirement of the new law.

Fewer voter registration drives mean fewer voters. But cutting back on voter registration drives does not have the effect of limiting the political participation of all citizens equally. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates that African American and Hispanic voters are more than twice as likely to register through voter registration drives as are white voters in Florida.

Democrats have also sought congressional investigations in order to address these laws. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.,requested congressional field hearings into the new laws, asking Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to schedule them. Nelson also sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department launch an investigation into whether the “new state voting laws resulted from collusion or an orchestrated effort to limit voter turnout.”

Florida is currently waiting for a ruling on the most controversial aspects of H.B. 1355 from a court in the District of Columbia.

Photo: Flickr/hjl

In the Houston Chronicle, Veasey complained that “statewide, 90 percent of the growth has been minority. …(Republicans) figured out how to draw another seat for voters who are shrinking in population.”

“Minorities accounted for almost all of the state’s population growth during the past 10 years, which resulted in Texas gaining four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives,” the Chronicle reported. Veasey’s suit argues the state’s map should include one new Hispanic-majority district, and one with an African-Americans majority.

Under the 1965 U.S. Voting Rights Act, any redistricting plan in Texas must be submitted for federal approval either to the Department of Justice or to a federal court, under a preclearance requirement of the law that’s increasingly contentious, as Stateline pointed out in an in-depth piece today.

That requirement, in Section 5 of the law, applies to Texas and at least part of 15 other states where, as the Pew Center on the States’ Stateline explains, there was a history of “low levels of voter participation and rules in place designed to reduce voter participation” — at least in the 1960s and 1970s, when the law took shape.

It’s the same process that Texas’ new voter ID law must clear. Those who’ll be challenging that law are waiting for Texas to submit it for federal preclearance so they can challenge it.

As Stateline explains, to clear the process, a state with a redistricting plan must prove it’s avoided watering down minority voting power in its new map. In the past, states would choose one path to preclearance or the other, but this year at least two states went for both at once:

This is a major change from previous rounds of redistricting and it comes with a politically loaded subtext: Conservative lawmakers mistrust the Obama administration’s Justice Department. They’re looking to either pressure Justice to approve their plans or to sidestep it in court.

Stateline goes on to explain why this year’s preclearance process has a whole new set of political issues at play, not least of all in Texas, where mistrust of the Obama administration runs deep:

For one thing, for the first time since the Voting Rights Act passed, a Democrat is in the White House during redistricting. While career staff in the Justice Department make preclearance recommendations, political appointees can overrule them — as George W. Bush’s Justice Department did for Texas and Georgia maps last decade. One of the big questions this cycle is whether the Obama administration will interpret the law differently than the Bush administration did.

Meanwhile, for the first time, most Southern states are firmly in the hands of Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas all are preclearance states and in all of them Republicans are in complete control of redistricting. Already, these Republican lawmakers are sparring with the Obama administration on health care, environmental rules and a host of other issues.

Texas hasn’t announced which route it’ll take to preclearance — Department of Justice approval, a federal court ruling or both.

Update at 4:29: Attorney General Greg Abbott just announced Texas had submitted its plan for preclearance today, doubling down and submitting plans to both the Department of Justice and U.S. District Court in Washington:

By informally submitting the State’s redistricting plans – along with relevant documents and data about those plans – to DOJ, the State is attempting to ensure that the Civil Rights Division and Attorney General Eric Holder have the information necessary to confirm that Texas has fully satisfied the Voting Rights Act’s requirements and is therefore entitled to preclearance.

While the federal government has approved two other states’ plans this year, Texas’ map is even “more complex” than others, Stateline writes:

The debate centers on Hispanic voters, but there’s no agreement on how many Hispanics have to be in one district to elect the Hispanic community’s candidate of choice.

While Congress extended Section 5, and the preclearance rule, for another 25 years pair, a pair of suits, in Shelby County, Ala., and Kinston, N.C., could force a Supreme Court decision that would put an end to preclearance entirely.

Though Obama and the DOJ have said several times that they would not use federal resources to go after those who are complying with state laws allowing the use of medical marijuana, U.S. Attorneys have been sending letters to state officials telling them that even state workers who handle regulation and licensing of the substance are at risk of federal arrest now.

In a press release, the ACLU said:

The ACLU also says in its letter that the recent U.S. Attorneys’ letters conflict with a DOJ representation to a federal court that the Ogden memo represented a significant policy shift, under which those individuals and entities that use or distribute medical marijuana in full compliance with state medical marijuana laws would no longer be targeted by federal law enforcement. Based on that representation, the ACLU in 2009 voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit against the federal government arising from a 2002 DEA raid of a California medical marijuana garden, in which the ACLU represents a group of plaintiffs including Santa Cruz, Calif. city and county officials, which sanctioned the garden. The federal court had previously upheld the ACLU’s 10th Amendment claim alleging the federal government had selectively enforced federal marijuana laws in an improper federal attempt to undermine and disable the functioning of state medical marijuana laws.

“If, contrary to the assurances its attorneys provided the court in the Santa Cruz case, the federal government’s enforcement policies now include ‘vigorously enforcing’ federal drug laws against individuals and entities who manufacture and distribute marijuana on a completely non-profit basis and in full compliance with state medical marijuana laws, it marks a significant departure from the federal government’s position in the Santa Cruz litigation and could lead to that case being reinstated in its October 2009 posture with discovery proceeding as originally planned,” the ACLU’s letter reads.

The judges will hear arguments from the Department of Justice, which filed a suit against the law in July, and the state, with 30 minutes for each side. If you want to watch, the hearing will be broadcast on CSPAN at 9 a.m. Pacific time, noon Eastern.

At stake is whether the law will continue to operate in its limited form, where it has yet to make much impact on policing immigration in Arizona. Law enforcement officials and human rights groups said they haven’t heard of additional arrests or stops under the law, although the provisions feared to provoke racial profiling have been blocked.

A number of groups, politicians and governments have come to the support of both Arizona and the Department of Justice, with amicus briefs filed on both sides to argue the law should or shouldn’t be allowed to go into effect. On Arizona’s side are a number of state attorneys general — particularly Republicans running for governor — and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The Mexican government and a number of human rights organizations support the Justice Department’s attempt to block the law.

No matter which way the judges rule, it’s unlikely the battle over SB 1070 will stop there. Arizona officials, including bill author state Rep. Russell Pearce (R), have promised to take the fight to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Plus, there are a few other pending lawsuits over SB 1070: Federal Judge Susan Bolton has yet to rule on Saldago v. Brewer and has not heard or ruled on National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders v. State of Arizona or LULAC v. Arizona.