Minn. students protest Arizona immigration law as it goes into effect

Activists hang a banner against the new immigration law in Phoenix Wednesday (Arizona Indymedia)

Echoing the 1960s Freedom Summer civil rights movement, four Minnesotans set off for Arizona this week to join hundreds of other young people working against the state’s new immigration law.

The four students are attending a large protest in Phoenix that was organized by immigrant rights group, Puente. The protests, which include civil disobedience, are also going on in Tucson, and are already leading to arrests and confrontations with the bill’s supporters, according to reports.

But, in the spirit of the original Freedom Summer, the students will also be waging a public relations campaign by door-knocking about the implications of the new law across the state, U of M Students for a Democratic Society organizer Grace Kelley told the Minnesota Independent.

“SDS as an organization participated in Freedom Summer in the 1960s when black people in the South were being lynched and killed and stopped from voting,” she said.  “It’s been called Arizona Freedom Summer 2010 because a lot of the immigrants and the native-born Chicano and Latino citizens here are participating in their own civil rights movement.”

Parts of the law were knocked down by a federal judge earlier this week. But the rest of the bill, which has drawn ire and threatened boycotts from civil rights activists, goes into effect today.

The DFL gubernatorial candidates have come out publicly against the Arizona law, while Republican Tom Emmer has spoken in favor of it, and just released a press release criticizing the federal judge’s ruling.