On the day a federal judge blocked parts of Arizona's immigration law, South Carolina Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, vowed to pass a similar law here.
"I am committed to continuing full steam to have a bill ready for the Senate and for us to pass a stronger Arizona style immigration bill when we return in January,” McConnell said.
On Thursday, GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley weighed in as well.
“Unless and until the federal government does its job, we will see governors across the country stepping up and protecting their citizens - and Nikki Haley will be first in line to do so,” Rob Godfrey, Haley Campaign Communications Director, said.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen's campaign did not respond to our request for his position on the issue.
State Law Enforcement Division Director Reggie Lloyd says an Arizona-style law would cost taxpayers millions of dollars. He spoke to a Senate subcommittee in May that was working on a similar bill.
The federal government requires that people charged with immigration violations be held in federally-certified jail facilities. Right now, the only federally-certified local jails in the state are in Charleston, Beaufort and York counties, so the state would have to spend millions to build new jails or upgrade existing ones, Lloyd says.
A law like Arizona's would require law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people arrested or detained for other reasons, if there's reasonable suspicion that someone is here illegally. But only officers who've gone through a four-week training course by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are allowed to check someone's immigration status. Lloyd says the training would cost local law enforcement in having those officers off the jobs for four weeks, if nothing else, and said ICE is limited in how many officers it can train.
Columbia resident Charles Salley hopes the state legislature does pass an immigration law like Arizona's. "I think it should because lots of these immigrants are taking over different things that the American people should already have."
But Harnoor Minhas, who's from India, says, "I'm not American, so anybody could stop me and ask me for my documentation and I'm not carrying my documentation all the time so I think that's an invasion of my privacy."
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