Utah attorneys defend immigration enforcement law
By david montero

The Salt Lake Tribune
First published 4 hours ago
Updated 5 minutes ago

Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s office says in court documents that a federal court injunction sought against the state’s enforcement-only immigration law should be denied outright.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of several undocumented immigrants and the Utah Coalition of La Raza by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center, charges Utah’s HB497 encourages racial profiling and violates the civil rights of undocumented immigrants as well as citizens.

They claim it would cause significant and irreparable harm if the law were to stand.

But attorneys for the state argued in the 47-page brief filed Wednesday in federal court that irreparable harm from racial profiling from HB497 couldn’t be proved because the law never really went into effect.

U.S. District Court Judge Clark Waddoups issued a temporary restraining order against the law May 10, leaving it in place for less than 15 hours before it was suspended.

Barry Lawrence, assistant attorney general, argued in the brief that the lawsuit is based on the enforcement-only Arizona law. That law was the subject of its own suit and eventually had several components of it tossed out by a federal judge who ruled several portions of it were unconstitutional.

Lawrence wrote in his brief that the Utah Legislature took “painstaking efforts to avoid the constitutional infirmities of the Arizona law.â€