About 200 people marched through Santa Cruz yesterday to protest Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, which went into effect yesterday. Although a federal judge blocked several of the more tendentious provisions, protesters claimed that the law would tear apart families and might even violate their constitutional rights. Many of the demonstrators also expressed the fear that the law could be copied by other states with significant immigrant populations. “It’s already started in Utah and Oklahoma, Texas, a bunch of other states are looking at Arizona,” Jesse Saba Kirschner told KSBW’s Phil Gomez. “I think people in the whole country have to speak out really loudly and say, ‘We’re not going to tolerate it in Arizona, and we’re not going to tolerate it here either.”
While demonstrations in San Francisco and Los Angeles resulted in over 30 arrests, police say that yesterday’s demonstration was very peaceful, and no problems were reported. Two Santa Cruz clergymen, Reverend Pallas Stanford of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County and Reverend Gregory Scott Ward of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Monterey Peninsula, were arrested with some 20 other Unitarian clergymen and women during demonstrations in Phoenix. Read more at Fox 35 and the Santa Cruz Sentinel or watch clip at KSBW.
