United States District Judge Richard Mark Gergel just handed down a preliminary injunction blocking several key parts of South Carolina’s anti-immigrant law. The provisions blocked by Judge Gergel’s opinion include:

• Papers Please: The SC law makes it unlawful for immigrants to fail to carry immigration papers. This provision is now blocked under Judge Gergel’s order. Additionally, Judge Gergel’s order suspends a provision prohibiting immigrants from presenting fake immigration papers to law enforcement.
• No Rides For Undocumented Immigrants: The SC law makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to “transport, move or attempt to transport” an undocumented immigrant “with intent to further that person’s unlawful entry into the United States” or to help that person avoid detection by authorities. This provision is now blocked.
• No Shelter For Undocumented Immigrants: Finally, the provision of the SC law making it a felony to “conceal, harbor or shelter” an immigrant for the same purposes forbidden under the provision prohibiting transportation is also blocked.

Judge Gergel’s opinion hews closely to longstanding precedents establishing that the federal government — and not the states — must be in charge of our nation’s immigration policy. For this reason, it is an important reaffirmation of the fact that America has one policy towards foreign nationals, just like it has one policy toward trade with China or one policy towards war with Iraq, not fifty different foreign policies for fifty different states.

Moreover, while Gergel leaves some parts of the law in effect, it is possible that more provisions of the law could be struck down at a future date. Although a challenge brought by several immigrant rights groups challenged the entire law, Gergel found that they did not have legal standing to bring such a broad challenge. Accordingly, he did not reach the merits of the question of whether the entire law is unconstitutional, and a future lawsuit could do so.

Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) emergence as the front-runner in the Iowa GOP primary is bringing new scrutiny on Paul’s newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. The newsletters, published under his name, included content claiming that African-Americans are trying to give white people HIV, suggested that Washington, DC is “anti-white and proud of it,” provided instructions on how to murder African-Americans, and warned of “malicious gay(s)” who spread HIV.

Yesterday, Paul walked out of an interview after CNN’s Gloria Borger pressed him on his role in publishing the racist content:

PAUL: I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written. And it’s been going on twenty years that people have pestered me about this. And CNN does it every single time.

BORGER: Is it legitimate? Is it a legitimate question to ask that something that went out under your name? [crosstalk]

PAUL: And when you get the answer it’s legitimate that you take the answers I give. You know what the answer is? I didn’t write them. I didn’t read them at the time. And I disavow them. That is the answer.

BORGER: It’s legitimate, it’s legitimate. These things are pretty incendiary.

PAUL: Because of people like you.

BORGER: No, come one. Some of the stuff was very incendiary, you know, saying that in 1993 the Israelis were responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center. That kind of stuff.

PAUL: Goodbye.

Watch it:

As reported yesterday on ThinkProgress, the likely author of the racist rants published under Paul’s name is Lew Rockwell, a notorious libertarian activist who led a campaign to align libertarians and bigots in the 1980s and 1990s. But the fact that his newsletter published racist statements over a series of years raises real questions about Paul’s claim that he “never read that stuff.” Thus far, Paul has refused to name the author(s) of the offensive articles.

In a seperate CNN interview yesterday, Paul said:

PAUL: I really don’t know [who the authors were]. Twenty years ago, I had six or eight people helping me with this letter, and I was practicing medicine, to tell you the truth.

VELSHI: Right.

PAUL: And, so, I do not know.

VELSHI: Well, we could find out because you have six or eight people, I guess, one of those six or eight people.

PAUL: Well, possibly, I could.

Paul’s assertion that CNN is to blame for asking him about the racist content of his newsletters is contradicted by his answer to a similar question in 2008, in which he told [VIDEO] CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I know there’s reason [to ask these questions]. I don’t say you’re unjustified in asking the question.”

MInority and immigrant rights groups have been pushing for John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of The John and Ken Show on the Clear Channel radio station KFI in California, to be taken off the air ever since the hosts targeted an immigrant advocate in a Sept. 1 show. On air, the hosts gave out the personal cell phone number of Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

Cabrera received hundreds of hateful and threatening phone calls afterward. “These calls were intent to diminish me as a person,” Cabrera told the Los Angeles Times. The show’s hosts have a history of discriminatory and vitriolic rhetoric, but this incident went too far:

The incident struck a chord among leaders of civil and immigrant rights groups across the state, many of whom saw it as the latest example in a long history of the popular radio show inciting anger and vitriol.

“It was the last straw,” said Alex Nogales, president and chief executive of the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC). “These guys have been at it day in and day out. It’s the same ugly rhetoric.” [...]

Now the coalition has joined with several major Latino and immigrant rights groups, including the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the National Immigration Law Center, in calling on the radio station to remove the show’s hosts or face a boycott of its sponsors.

To pressure the sponsors, the NHMC has been asking people to contact the show’s major sponsors, such as Chevron, Hyundai, and Target, to ask them to stop sponsoring The John and Ken Show, and they are asking people to stop shopping at the advertisers if they don’t pull their ads. “As a consumer, let the advertisers know you are not willing to spend your hard earned money with businesses that support hate speech,” according to the NHMC’s campaign.

For more information about the campaign, click here.