This week, a Federal District Court Judge in Alabama delivered a decision that has sent shockwaves across the country – allowing some of the most egregious sections of Alabama’s punitive and discriminatory anti-immigrant law to go into effect.

Alabama can now require public schools to demand documentation from parents of all children in K-12 programs, whether or not the children are U.S. citizens. I’m sorry, but WTF?!

Alabama is also able to void any contract signed by an undocumented person and make it a felony for any undocumented immigrant to apply for a driver’s license or even a license plate. And to top it all off, local police in Alabama – long known for their commitment to civil rights – will now be permitted to demand “papers, please” from anyone they suspect may be undocumented.

Just days old, the ruling is already having a devastating impact on school kids:

Many of the 223 Hispanic students at Foley Elementary came to school Thursday crying and afraid, said Principal Bill Lawrence. 

Nineteen of them withdrew, and another 39 were absent, Lawrence said, the day after a federal judge upheld Alabama’s strict new immigration law, which authorizes law enforcement to detain people suspected of not being U.S. citizens and requires schools to ask new enrollees for a copy of their birth certificate.

Even more of the students — who are U.S. citizens by birth, but their parents may not be — were expected to leave the state over the weekend, Lawrence said.

“It’s been a challenging day, an emotional day. My children have been in tears today. They’re afraid,” he said. “We have been in crisis-management mode, trying o help our children get over this.”

It’s heart wrenching to watch. But, this is what the sponsors of the legislation wanted to accomplish. In another part of the world, they’d call it ethnic cleansing – make the lives of entire communities so miserable that they are forced out. Already, there are reports of harassment on the ground and people being served with eviction notices.

An emergency response is being mobilized to handle the humanitarian crisis brewing down there and calls on state officials and Washington to stop this civil rights crisis are taking shape.

As my boss Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice Education Fund said, “This is an ugly law and an outrageous ruling. The federal government is in charge of immigration policy and it is the federal government’s job to fix what is broken. State laws like Alabama’s won’t fix anything; they just make a bad system worse and pit groups against each other. The Alabama law plays to Americans’ worst fears rather than our best instincts. We need to demand more from our representatives, both in the statehouses and in Congress.”

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