ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2007, Prince William County (PWC) in Northern Virginia, once the setting of major Civil War battles, became mired in a different battle, one revolving around illegal immigration. Local activists had mounted a campaign to drive out the county’s undocumented immigrant population, whose presence they claimed was detrimental to the community. The activists accused undocumented immigrants of overcrowding housing and failing to maintain properties, overburdening the school system and the general infrastructure and bringing crime and disease to the community. The Board of County Supervisors, the county’s eight-member policy-making entity, now deliberated a resolution whose stated intent was to ‘protect … inhabitants [from] hardship and lawlessness’ caused by the county’s undocumented residents (Prince William County Board of Supervisors 2007). The resolution, commonly referred to as the Rule of Law Resolution, ordered the county police department to work with the Department of Homeland Security to authorize local police officers to check, during routine police work, the immigration status of individuals suspected of unlawful presence. The Rule of Law Resolution also sought to exclude undocumented residents from a range of public services in a professed attempt to rein in county spending and discourage undocumented settlement.
