[migrawatch-public] Judge Voids Local Ordinance on Undocumented Immigrants
Hazleton immigration law is rejected
Times Staff Writers
July 27, 2007
WASHINGTON - A federal judge on Thursday struck down a Pennsylvania city's ordinance that sought to punish landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and employers who hire them, ruling that immigration law is the province of the federal government alone.
The measure in Hazleton had become a symbol and an inspiration for a growing movement among state and city officials to enact local laws to combat illegal immigration. Supporters of this effort charge that Washington has failed to control the U.S. borders or deal with the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants who live in the country.
Activists on both sides of the issue said that Thursday's decision - the first after a trial in federal court - dealt a major setback, but not a final defeat, to these local initiatives.
"Immigration is a national issue," U.S. District Judge James M. Munley said in knocking down the ordinance adopted last year in Hazleton, a city of about 30,000 that is 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Led by the city's outspoken mayor, Louis J. Barletta, the City Council voted to fine landlords who rented to illegal immigrants and to revoke business permits of employers who hired them.
But Munley blocked the measures from taking effect and, in Thursday's 206-page decision, concluded that local officials lacked authority to go beyond federal law and impose penalties on businesses for hiring illegal immigrants.
"Allowing states or local governments to legislate with regard to the employment of unauthorized aliens would interfere with congressional objectives" to control immigration policy, Munley said.
The judge also noted that people in the country illegally had the legal right to challenge discriminatory ordinances in court.
"We cannot say clearly enough that persons who enter this country without legal authorization are not stripped immediately of all their rights because of this single illegal act," Munley wrote.
He noted that the Constitution says no person may be deprived of "due process of law." The Supreme Court has said this protection extends to those who have entered the country illegally, he added.
Civil liberties lawyers who sued to void the Hazleton ordinance called the ruling a sweeping victory and said it dealt a "body blow" to other local efforts to regulate illegal immigrants. Hazleton has inspired similar measures nationally.
"Today's decision sends an unmistakable message to local officials across the nation that these types of ordinances are a waste of taxpayers' money, anathema to American values and a violation of the Constitution," said Omar Jadwat of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project.
The ruling was also welcomed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "State and local governments have no business setting national immigrant policy," said the agency's National Chamber Litigation Center.
But advocates of stricter measures against illegal immigrants said they were confident the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold a Hazleton-style ordinance.
"What's at stake . is the right of local communities to govern how business and commerce are conducted within their jurisdictions," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "We are confident when the high court reviews the facts of this case, they will side with the right of local communities to take steps to protect themselves against the destructive impact of mass illegal immigration."
Congress has tried and failed to pass comprehensive immigration legislation for the last two years. States and localities have moved aggressively to fill the vacuum. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that 1,200 local immigration measures are in progress or have passed. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund estimates that more than 100 localities have passed anti-immigration ordinances.
Many of these measures also face legal challenges. Last year, the Escondido, Calif., City Council moved to fine landlords who rented to illegal immigrants but withdrew the ordinance after it was put on hold by a federal judge.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, in the first four months of this year, state lawmakers had introduced at least 1,169 bills and resolutions related to immigration - compared with 570 bills introduced last year.
Barletta introduced his proposal in June 2006 after two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged with killing a 29-year-old Hazleton man. "Illegal immigrants are destroying the city," Barletta said then.
(The homicide charges were dropped three weeks ago because, prosecutors said, key witnesses were unreliable or unavailable. The men were to remain jailed until deportation.)
The former coal town had changed dramatically since Barletta became mayor in 2000, when the city had a population of 23,000, about 5% of whom were Latino. Cheap housing and proximity to farms and factories drew immigrants. By 2006, city officials estimated the town's population at 31,000, with 30% of residents Latino.
During the federal trial in March, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union disputed claims that new immigrants were responsible for an increase in crime. They introduced a 2002 study which found that native-born men were five times more likely to be incarcerated than those who were foreign-born.
Marshall Fitz of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. said the ruling was significant for the same reason Hazleton's ordinance was significant. "It was the first one. If there are enough of these rulings, you are going to see states and localities second-guessing whether they want to go forward with these." Fitz said a ruling by one federal district judge set no precedent but was "an important signal."
Irvine immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli - president of the Academy of Business Immigration Lawyers, which says it advocates "enlightened business immigration reform" - said the ruling could cool local illegalimmigration campaigns.
"I think the cities and states will be given a handy justification for not taking action," he said, "and I hope the pressure will be redirected back at Congress, where it belongs."
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Judge Voids Ordinance on Illegal Immigrants
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times Mayor Louis J. Barletta of Hazleton, Pa., vowed to appeal a ruling.
Mayor Louis J. Barletta of Hazleton, Pa., vowed to appeal a ruling.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday struck down ordinances adopted by the City of Hazleton to bar illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there, the most resounding legal blow so far to local efforts across the country to crack down on illegal immigration.
The decision, by Judge James M. Munley of Federal District Court, presents a new roadblock to local officials who want to take action against illegal immigration after broad federal legislation to address the issue failed in the Senate last month.
Judge Munley ruled that ordinances first passed last July by the Hazleton City Council interfered with federal law, which regulates immigration, and violated the due process rights of employers, landlords and illegal immigrants.
The ruling resonated beyond Hazleton because the town was the first in the country to pass such measures, after its mayor, Louis J. Barletta, vowed last year to make the city "one of the toughest places in the United States" for illegal immigrants. Many other local initiatives were modeled on Hazleton's ordinances, which were never put into effect because of the legal challenge.
"Whatever frustrations officials of the City of Hazleton may feel about the current state of immigration enforcement," Judge Munley wrote in the 206-page decision, "the nature of the political system in the United States prohibits the city from enacting ordinances that disrupt a carefully drawn federal statutory scheme."
Mr. Barletta said the city would appeal and would fight to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.
"I will not sit back because the federal government has refused to do its job," Mr. Barletta said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall.
Judge Munley reached his conclusion after a full hearing of the issues in a bench trial, the first such trial in the various legal challenges to local ordinances restricting illegal immigration. The challenge was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and Cozen O'Connor, a private law firm.
The judge emphasized that illegal immigrants had the same civil rights as legal immigrants and citizens.
"Hazleton, in its zeal to control the presence of a group deemed undesirable, violated the rights of such people, as well as others within the community," he wrote.
Kris W. Kobach, a University of Missouri law professor who assisted Hazleton, called the ruling "an extraordinarily bold activist decision." Mr. Kobach said Judge Munley had misconstrued the limitations on cities like Hazleton in making laws on immigration, which is generally subject to federal law.
According to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, more than 100 municipalities have considered ordinances to crack down on illegal immigrants.
On June 19 a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a housing ordinance similar to Hazleton's in Farmers Branch, Tex., a Dallas suburb. The ordinance, which voters approved in May, would have imposed fines on landlords who rented to illegal immigrants.
Last Friday, the city of Valley Park, Mo., rescinded a similar housing ordinance, after one version of it was struck down in March by a state judge and a revised ordinance brought new state and federal challenges. Similar ordinances were dropped in Escondido, Calif.
Mr. Barletta, the Hazleton mayor, has championed the city's ordinances because he said illegal immigrants had unleashed a crime wave in Hazleton and had overburdened health and other public services.
At the nine-day trial in March, A.C.L.U. lawyers worked as hard to debunk those claims as they did to undercut the city's legal arguments. They showed that 4 of 428 violent crimes in Hazleton in the last six years could be attributed to illegal immigrants.
"This opinion should be a glaring red stop light for any local officials thinking about passing similar laws," said Witold Walczak, the lead A.C.L.U. lawyer in the case.
Among the plaintiffs were four illegal immigrants. Judge Munley allowed them to remain anonymous and to testify through depositions.
This month Pennsylvania prosecutors dropped murder charges against two immigrants in the May 2006 shooting of Derek Kichline, a Hazleton resident whom Mr. Barletta often cited as a victim of an illegal immigrant crime wave. The prosecutors said that important witnesses were not available to testify, including one illegal immigrant who had been deported by federal authorities.
Mr. Barletta and his campaign against illegal immigrants have remained popular in Hazleton, a faded coal-mining center 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia that has recently seen a manufacturing revival. In a mayoral primary in May, Mr. Barletta handily won both the Republican and the Democratic nominations.
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