Legal organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, Americans for Immigrant Justice and American Immigration Council, filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging Florida’s new anti-immigrant law.
Florida SB 1718 passed in the Republican-controlled legislature in May and went into effect July 1. Provisions of the bill include requiring all businesses with 25 or more employee to use federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of employees and requires hospitals to ask patients whether they are U.S. citizens or in the country legally. Gov. Ron. DeSantis said the billwas “fighting back against reckless federal government policies and ensuring the Florida taxpayers are not footing the bill for illegal immigration.”
RELATED: Why Florida's new immigration law is troubling businesses and workers alike
The lawsuit challenging SB 1718 focuses on Section 10 of the law, which criminalizes transportation of individuals into the state who have entered the country illegally and have not been “inspected”. The complaint says it is unconstitutional for a state to unilaterally regulate federal immigration and subject people to criminal punishment without fair notice, according to a press release from the ACLU of Florida.
The lawsuit also takes issue with the law’s use of the term “inspection,” which the lawsuit says is “unconstitutionally vague.”
“As news of the predictable damage inflicted on Florida by SB 1718 comes in, we are filing this lawsuit to stop its unconstitutional criminalization of the immigrant community in a state where one-fifth of the population was born abroad,” said Amien Kacou, staff attorney for the ACLU of Florida in a statement. “This legislation is not the solution to any problem. It is an attempt to scapegoat and terrorize vulnerable families and workers already burdened by the difficulty of the federal immigration process and to pick a fight with the federal government in order to serve the ambitions of a few politicians. Our challenge aims to uphold the Constitution and protect our communities from the rising threat of discrimination posed by this new Florida law.”
After backlash from migrant workers, and threats of strikes, some Republican lawmakers tried to curb a mass exodus of workers by touting the bill’s loopholes. State Rep. Alina Garcia, a Republican, even admitted the bill had “no teeth” and was meant to scare people from coming to Florida.