From our friend, David Leopold, who is the immediate past President of American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA):

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a loud and clear voice, blocked three key pillars of the Arizona law — the provisions making it a crime for immigrants to fail to register under a federal law, making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work or solicit work, and allowing the police to arrest people without warrants if they have probable cause to believe that they have done things that would make them deportable under federal law. This is a significant blow to the guts of the Arizona immigration statute and its impact will be felt across the country in other states — most notably Alabama and Georgia, which have enacted similar anti-immigrant provisions.

And the Court didn’t mince words. It made abundantly clear that immigration law is a federal matter and states should keep their hands off. Using strong language it said that these provisions were clearly preempted by federal law because they stand as obstacles to the enforcement of immigration law as enacted by Congress. The subtext of the Court’s decision is that if each state were permitted to enact its own immigration enforcement scheme, then there would be little need for a federal government; the United States would, in effect, cease to be united under a national authority. As the Court said,

Federal law makes a single sovereign responsible for maintaining a comprehensive and unified system to keep track of aliens within the Nation’s borders. If §3 of the Arizona statute were valid, every State could give itself independent authority to prosecute federal registration violations, ‘diminish[ing] the [Federal Government]‘s control over enforcement’ and ‘detract[ing] from the ‘integrated scheme of regulation’ created by Congress.  FULL STORY HERE>>>