Arizona’s SB 1070, the state’s 2010 illegal immigration enforcement law, is mostly inoperative today. Only one of its contested provisions still binds police: during a lawful stop, officers must try to verify immigration status if they have reasonable suspicion the person is in the country without authorization. A separate section lets Arizona residents sue cities and counties that adopt sanctuary-style policies. Everything else the law originally tried to do was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012.
What Still Applies Under SB 1070
Two parts of the law remain enforceable.
The Immigration Status Check (Section 2(B))
Codified at Arizona Revised Statutes 11-1051(B), this provision requires state and local officers to make a reasonable attempt to verify immigration status whenever a person has been lawfully stopped, detained, or arrested and the officer has reasonable suspicion the person is unlawfully present. For anyone formally arrested, status must be determined before release. Verification runs through the federal government under 8 U.S.C. ยง 1373(c).
The Supreme Court allowed this provision to take effect partly because it had not yet been enforced, so there was no record of how it would work in practice. The majority was explicit that the provision’s survival depended on narrow enforcement, and the Court left the door open for future challenges if status checks began prolonging routine detentions or produced discriminatory patterns.
Lawsuits Against Sanctuary Policies (Section 2(G))
Section 2(G) gives any Arizona resident a private right of action against a city, town, county, or state agency that adopts a policy limiting immigration enforcement below the full extent federal law allows. A court that finds a violation must order the government entity to pay the plaintiff’s court costs and attorney fees, plus a civil penalty of $1,000 to $5,000 for each day the offending policy remained in effect after the lawsuit was filed. Collected penalties go to the Department of Public Safety’s gang and immigration intelligence team enforcement mission fund.
This provision was never challenged in Arizona v. United States and remains fully in force.
What the Supreme Court Struck Down
In Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387 (2012), the Court invalidated three of the law’s four most prominent provisions, finding they intruded on the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration.
Section 3 made it a state misdemeanor to be in Arizona without carrying federal registration papers. The Court held that Congress had built a complete federal registration system that left no room for parallel state penalties, even duplicative ones.
Section 5(C) would have made it a state crime for an unauthorized immigrant to seek or hold a job. The Court pointed to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which deliberately imposed penalties on employers but chose not to criminalize work from the employee’s side. A state law criminalizing what Congress intentionally left non-criminal was an obstacle to the federal scheme.
Section 6 would have let state officers make warrantless arrests of anyone they had probable cause to believe had committed a removable offense. The Court found this stripped the federal government of its discretion over when to begin removal proceedings.
None of these three sections can be enforced. If an officer tells you otherwise, they are wrong.
Limits on How Officers Can Carry Out a Status Check
The statute and the Supreme Court’s guidance impose several constraints:
- Officers may not consider race, color, or national origin when implementing the status-check requirement, except to the extent the U.S. or Arizona Constitution permits.
- A person is presumed not to be unlawfully present if they show a valid Arizona driver’s license, a state-issued nonoperating ID, a tribal enrollment card, or any other government-issued ID that required proof of legal presence before issuance.
- Officers cannot extend a routine stop to wait for a federal immigration response. If the original reason for the stop has been resolved, holding someone longer to complete an immigration check raises constitutional problems the Supreme Court flagged directly.
- Officers can skip the status check entirely if making the determination would hinder or obstruct an ongoing investigation.
Your Rights During a Stop
Several constitutional protections apply regardless of your citizenship or immigration status.
The Fifth Amendment protects your right to remain silent. You are not required to answer questions about your immigration status, nationality, or country of birth, and you can say you are exercising that right. Refusing to identify yourself during a lawful stop can have separate consequences under Arizona’s stop-and-identify laws, so the practical situation is more nuanced than staying quiet about everything.
If you carry a valid Arizona driver’s license, state-issued ID, tribal enrollment card, or other government ID that required proof of legal presence to obtain, showing it creates a statutory presumption that you are lawfully present. Officers should accept it and stop the immigration inquiry there.
And if the reason for your stop has been resolved, officers cannot hold you longer solely to wait on an immigration response from the federal government.
The 2016 Settlement
Civil rights organizations continued litigating over how Section 2(B) was being enforced after 2012. In September 2016, the parties settled. Arizona paid legal fees and the Attorney General’s Office issued an informal opinion establishing constitutional guidelines for implementing the status-check requirement. In exchange, the plaintiffs dropped their remaining claims.
Section 2(B) was not repealed. ARS 11-1051 is still on the books and still enforceable. What the settlement did was formalize the limits the Supreme Court had foreshadowed, giving officers clearer guardrails on prolonged detention, racial profiling, and the ID-based presumption of lawful presence.
Arizona’s Separate E-Verify Law for Employers
SB 1070 is often confused with the Legal Arizona Workers Act, a different statute. Enacted in 2007 and codified in Title 23, Chapter 2 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, it requires every Arizona employer to use the federal E-Verify system to confirm work authorization for employees hired after December 31, 2007. This law survived its own Supreme Court challenge in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting (2011) and remains fully in force.
Penalties scale with the employer’s level of knowledge:
- First knowing violation: terminate all unauthorized workers, file quarterly new-hire reports at the affected location for three years of probation, and possible business license suspension up to ten business days.
- Second knowing violation: permanent revocation of the business license at the location where the unauthorized work occurred.
- First intentional violation: terminate all unauthorized workers, file quarterly reports for five years of probation, and mandatory license suspension of at least ten days.
- Second intentional violation: permanent revocation of all business licenses.
A second violation counts as such only if it occurs at the same business location as the first during the probationary period. Employers who don’t use E-Verify are also ineligible for state economic development incentives and government contracts.