This provision was interpreted so as to make it a crime to apply for a marriage license or get a permit for a mobile home. Localities have been refusing to supply water and electricity to Latinos who could not prove their legal status.
U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson ruled in a case involving the owners of mobile homes who were about to lose their homes because the law prevented the owners from registering them.
The judge said that the law harmed both the undocumented and their US-citizen children. He wrote that the law’s “treatment of children in mixed-status families, who are overwhelmingly Latino, is so markedly different from the state’s historical treatment of children in general suggests strongly that the difference in treatment was driven by animus against Latinos in general and thus that the statute was discriminatorily based.”
The judge also quoted the sponsors of the law itself who repeatedly referred to local Latinos in derogatory terms and used phrases like “illegal immigrant” and “Hispanic” interchangeably.
Image courtesy of Anuska Sampedro via Flickr.
