Professor Lawrence Alexander, who teaches constitutional law at UCSD, said that argument would fail because the Arizona law does not conflict with federal immigration law. The state law is only seeking to enforce the federal law, he said.
“I don’t see anything in this law that is going to fail a challenge on the grounds of federal supremacy,” Alexander said…
The panelists agreed that defining what constitutes “reasonable suspicion” could be problematic. But that alone does not render the law unconstitutional, Alexander said.
“Could a police officer overstep the bounds and do something that the Constitution does not permit? Of course,” he said. “Police officers can do that now. They can do that without the law, but the law itself does not authorize anything that is unconstitutional.”
