A ruling Monday from a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of a new law in Alabama dealing with illegal immigration. However, the law could still come to fruition, which Dallas County Probate Judge Kim Ballard said can create major problems at the courthouse.

“The immigration bill is causing major headaches in the tag office,” he said. “They are putting the burden on us to decide if these people are citizens or illegal immigrants. We don’t mind doing what we need to do, but it is going to cause the lines to get much longer.”

The brief order by U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Blackburn means the law — which opponents and supporters alike have called the toughest in the nation — won’t take effect as scheduled on Thursday.

The judge said she will issue a longer ruling by Sept. 28, and her temporary order will remain in effect until the day after. She heard arguments from the Justice Department and others during a daylong hearing last week.

If the law is passed, Ballard said it will present a number of challenges to  county administrators and citizens.

“If this thing is implemented, it’s going to slow our process down,” he said. “It would make it almost impossible to have mail order tags, which keeps people out of the lines. If you have to have all this verification that you are a citizen, I’m not sure that’s going to work anymore.”

For now, license commissioner Ed Foster said, we can’t be sure how the law will affect procedures in Dallas County because it is impossible to know which parts of the law will be approved, if any.

“We really can’t say yet until they come out and tell us,” he said. “With the injunction on the law we have to wait and see. We don’t know what parts they might take out.”

The law would also require schools to verify the citizenship status of students, but it wouldn’t prevent illegal immigrants from attending public schools.

The law also would make it a crime to knowingly assist an illegal immigrant by providing them a ride, a job, a place to live or most anything else — a section that church leaders fear would hamper public assistance ministries. It also would allow police to jail suspected illegal immigrants during traffic stops.

Finding a way to curtail public spending that benefits illegal immigrants has been a pet project of Alabama conservatives for years. Census figures released earlier this year show the state’s Hispanic population more than doubled over a decade to 185,602 last year, and supporters of the law contend many of them are in the country illegally.

– The Associated Press contributed to this report