The Obama administration's lawsuit against Arizona, officially unveiled on Tuesday, [PDF]is an affront to all law-abiding Americans. It is a threatening salvo aimed at all local, county or state governments that dare to take control of the immigration chaos in their own backyards. And it is being driven by open-borders extremists who have dedicated their political careers to subverting homeland security policies in the name of compassion and diversity.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, headed by Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, took the lead in prepping the legal brief against Arizona. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a far-left lawyer and activist who worked for the late mass illegal alien amnesty champion Ted Kennedy and served in the Clinton administration DOJ. While holding down a key government position there in which he was entrusted to abide by the rule of law, Perez volunteered for CASA de Maryland[Email them]—a notorious illegal alien advocacy group funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants and radical liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute (not to mention more than $1 million showered on the group by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez's regime-owned oil company, CITGO).

Perez rose from CASA de Maryland volunteer to president of the group's board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the "multicultural" experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal alien benefits ranging from in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students to driver's licenses. CASA de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested post-9/11 coordination of local, state and national criminal databases, and produced a "know your rights" propaganda pamphlet for illegal aliens depicting federal immigration agents as armed bullies making babies cry.

In 2006, CASA de Maryland threatened to protest at the schools of children whose parents belonged to the pro-immigration enforcement group Minuteman Project—and then headed into the Montgomery County, Md., public schools to recruit junior amnesty protesters who were offered school credits for traveling with CASA de Maryland to march on Washington.

As a former Maryland resident, I got to see Perez's militant friends and colleagues in action. I watched CASA de Maryland President Gustavo Torres (who met with President Obama last week) complain that motor vehicle administration officials have "absolutely no right to ask for people's Social Security number or immigration status to get a driver's license." I stood among CASA de Maryland grievance-mongers who shouted, "No license, no justice! No justice, no peace!" while playing the race card against naturalized Americans and legal immigrants who opposed the illegal alien welfare state.

Perez himself derided secure-borders citizen activists as "xenophobes," but denied painting the grassroots immigration enforcement movement as racist. Questioned by GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions during his Obama DOJ confirmation hearing last year about the illegal alien rights guide produced by CASA de Maryland, Perez grudgingly stated that "the Civil Rights Division must not act in contravention to valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration laws." [PDF]But "act(ing) in contravention" is exactly what the Civil Rights Division is doing in spearheading the challenge to Arizona's valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration law.

Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder and the rest of the open-borders DOJ team have invoked a "preemption" doctrine based on the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause to attack Arizona's anti-illegal immigration measure and oppose local and state enforcement of federal immigration laws. Never mind that the Arizona law was drafted scrupulously to comply with all federal statutes and the Constitution.

You gotta love Obama's fair-weather friends of the Constitution. When a state acts to do the job the feds won't do, Obama's legal eagles run to the Founding Fathers for protection. When, on the other hand, left-wing cities across the country pass illegal alien sanctuary policies that flagrantly defy national immigration laws and hamper cross-jurisdiction enforcement, the newfound federal preemption advocates are nowhere in sight.

The Obama DOJ's lawsuit against Arizona is sabotage of the people's will and the government's fundamental responsibility to provide for the common defense. No border enforcement, no security. No security, no peace.

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Michelle Malkin [email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow's review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website. Michelle Malkin is also author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild and the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies.