Thread: A tale of two cities: Hazleton’s IIRA assailed

GO HAZELTON!
This is a very important case! We need to give every bit of support we can to defeat the political organizations attacking Hazeltons ability to survive.

A tale of two cities: Hazleton’s IIRA assailed, defended in trial’s opening Print
Tuesday, 13 March 2007
By KENT JACKSON
kentjackson@standardspeker.com
SCRANTON – Opposing attorneys told a tale of two Hazletons as a trial about the city’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act began Monday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. IIRA.jpgAbout five years ago, Latinos flocked to Hazleton, opened businesses in boarded-up stores, received encouragement from the city government and pushed the population from 23,000 up to 30,000, according to estimates.
“They had established roots in the community, paid property tax, worked hard and lived clean,” Vic Walczak, Pennsylvania legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups suing the city, said.
Then last spring, Hazleton became a different place, the attorneys and witnesses said.
Latinos felt unwelcome and violent crimes caught the public’s attention. On May 10, 2006, people awoke to the news that Derek Kichline had been shot to death in a crime for which four illegal immigrants await trial.
“May 10 was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Kris Kobach, an attorney for Hazleton, said.
Responding to the killing and other crimes and trying to reduce the strain on city services provided to “illegal aliens,” Mayor Louis Barletta advocated the act.
The act penalizes landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and businesses that hire them. It has been suspended since last fall when Judge James M. Munley, who will decide the case, formally known as Lozano et al. v. City of Hazleton, issued a temporary restraining order.
Dr. Agapito Lopez, a Hazleton eye surgeon and the first witness called, said the act divided the city, cooled cordial relations with his neighbors and frightened Latinos.
“They fear they may be unjustly evicted,” said Lopez, who said he received three pieces of hate mail after opposing the act.
Luis and Rosa Lechuga, who owned a store and restaurant in Hazleton, testified that they noticed a change in the social and business climate of Hazleton because of the act.
In his opening statement, Walczak said the novel A Tale of Two Cities could have described Hazleton.
Each side in the trial will provide a different version about the act and its constitutionality.
“What in reality is two tales of a city,” he said, and added later: “The two tales are irreconcilable.”
Walczak said the act makes Hazleton the first city in the United States to attempt to exclude illegal immigrants from working or renting, but takes a cue from efforts to exclude other newcomers during previous waves of immigration in the nation’s history.
The act requires tenants to show proof of legal residence or citizenship.
“Neither is required by federal law,” Walczak said.
Distinguishing legal status requires the complex administrative and legal procedures of the federal system, he said.
The act relies on the federal government to determine a person’s status through mechanisms that Walczak said aren’t in place.
He said the act is driven by complaints so vengeful neighbors can file complaints and face no penalty for lying.
Where Hazleton claims to have been overrun, Walczak said the city’s defenders cannot say how many illegal immigrants live there. He said the city lacked crime statistics involving illegal immigrants when proposing the act in June 2006.
It cannot say how much is paid to teachers in Hazleton schools to teach English as a Second Language for children of legal residents, Walczak said.
Kobach, however, said Kichline’s murder epitomized the serious crime occurring in Hazleton.
He also described the role of illegal immigrants in killings in 2005 and 2001, but before that said the city had gone seven years without a murder.
Illegal immigrants were arrested for three crimes between 2000 and 2004, but five were arrested in 2005 in cases that Kobach said all involved drugs and murder. The 19 arrests of illegal immigrants last year involved charges of murder, rape and assault.
A major drug bust performed last year after two years of investigation involved illegal aliens and gangs including MS-13 and the Latin Kings have come to Hazleton, he said.
While the serious crime prompted action in Hazleton, the city’s act also might expose those who violate more mundane federal laws.
It is a federal crime to use a false Social Security number to get a job or open a bank account or to use any forged document, Kobach pointed out.
Federal policy is to provide information about a person’s immigration status and Washington has set up three programs to help police, social agencies and employers verify status, he said.
Kobach also said Hazleton had a proud tradition of immigration throughout the previous century.
In contrast to Walczak, who alluded to the novel and quoted FDR as saying America is a nation of immigrants, Kobach quoted legal opinions and outlined his opening statement such as a lecture at the University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, where he teaches.
Deciding the case might be academic, too, according to Kobach.
The case probably could have been judged Monday, he said, without facts that witnesses will present during testimony, which is expected to last two weeks.
Unlike a criminal case where evidence goes to the question of “Did he do it,” Kobach said this case asks the judge to interpret whether the act is constitutional.
Because the restraining order kept the act from being enforced so far, testimony from business owners and landlords who claim injury is premature, in Kobach’s opinion.
During testimony, however, the Lechugas said both the store and restaurant that they operated on North Wyoming Street folded since the act was proposed.
Questioned by Denise Alvarez, an attorney for plaintiffs, which include the ACLU and the Puerto Rican National Defense and Education Fund, the Lechugas said their customers from out of town didn’t want to shop in Hazleton.
“They heard police were stopping people for not having a license,” Luis Lechuga said through an intepreter.
Police cruisers parked outside the restaurant and once an officer entered, it led customers to spread the word that police were watching, Rosa Lechuga said.
During cross-examination, Henry “Hank” Mahoney of Philadelphia, the lead attorney for Hazleton, asked if the Lechugas knew that Latino businesses-owners had asked police to patrol after crime increased in the neighborhood.
Mahoney went over tax records that showed the Lechugas lost money before 2006 when city council passed the act.
They also failed to pay the mortgage on the building that contained their home and store for a year before the act’s passage, the records showed.
Their house is up for sheriff’s sale and the Lechugas, who entered the United States illegally but became legal residents through the 1987 federal amnesty, are moving to Arkansas, where some of their children are staying with an aunt.
“This has been terrible … (there is) separation in the family,” Luis Lechuga said.
He said his daughter, about to graduate from Hazleton Area High School, transferred to Arkansas after being harassed for her Mexican heritage.
Pedro Lozano, for whom the case is named, testified that tenants left the apartments adjoining his home in Hazleton after the ordinance passed.
Since then, the apartments have been occupied intermittently for lower rent, he said, also through an interpreter.
Asked by David Vaida, an Allentown attorney assisting the plaintiffs, if he talked to tenants about their legal status, Lozano he had no training to determine the authenticity of immigration documents.
“You have to be careful with things like that … he or she might be able to sue me because a housing law says you can’t discriminate,” Lozano said.
Cross-examined by Andrew Adair, part of the city’s legal team, Lozano said he knew that his tenants were illegal immigrants even though he never asked about their status.
“I didn’t need to be told,” he said. “They left.”

http://www.standardspeaker.com/index.ph ... 4&Itemid=2

I still can't believe that this topic is even up for discussion.

For we all know that in Mexico, if it were Americans doing this there, we would have all been arrested and deported LONG AGO for TRYING TO CHANGE THE LAWS!!!

What we are seeing in Hazelton is coming after a long long list of litigations that have enjoyed far too much success due to liberal bench legislatures and the flat out bullying by activist organizations.
The times though they are a change'n and the pendulum is swinging the other way.


"Beginning in 1985, the Lawyer's Guild began to receive the first of its $416,000 in Ford Foundation grants for "refugee and migrant rights." Members of the organization would play a prominent role in MALDEF's first litigation specifically on behalf of illegal aliens, Plyler v. Doe (1982). Argued by the Guild's Peter Schey before the U.S. Supreme Court, the case resulted in a 5-4 decision that states could not deny illegal immigrant children access in public education. (It would be this decision that would lead opponents of Proposition 187 to contend that it was unconstitutional.) Continuing its efforts to expand education rights for illegal aliens, MALDEF won the right in Leticia A. v. Board of Regents (1985) for illegal alien children to establish California residency so they might pay the lower in-state tuition in the state's university system. According to their 1993 annual report, MALDEF is currently working to "retain [these] hard-won educational opportunities for Latino students."

MALDEF's efforts on behalf of illegal aliens were not limited to education. In other litigation, they prevented Los Angeles County from forcing illegals to apply for Medi-Cal to receive non-emergency health services, because, for this to happen, they would have to be referred to the INS. As Peter Tijerina, MALDEF's founder, told Vista magazine,"Hell, the remedies weren't in the streets, they were in the courts." And the money to pay for it all was in the Ford Foundation's bank account. According to funding requests, MALDEF sought $600,000 from Ford in 1985 and 1986 for support of their Immigrants' Civil Rights Program and Political Access Program. For these two years, MALDEF requested $2.8 million; they received 92 percent of that amount. According to Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform,"The root of all of this is the Ford Foundation..."

To compliment efforts by MALDEF and the ACLU, the Ford Foundation launched a new program in 1982 on behalf of refugees and immigrants aimed at strengthening public and private agencies that assist them, clarifying their rights and responsibilities under domestic and international law. Between 1982-88, Ford would commit more than $25 million to these efforts. Following passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, MALDEF, La Raza, and other Hispanic groups split a $200,000 Ford grant to promote amnesty applications among illegals.

"I think Franklin Thomas [president of the Ford Foundation from 1979] was interested in the expansion of rights: immigrant rights, women's rights..." says William Diaz, former Ford programming officer in charge of Hispanic groups. "His concern for Hispanics was also a major part of his administration." By the early 1990's this concern had resulted in federal recognition of Hispanics as a distinct ethnic minority deserving of affirmative-action, government set-asides, multilingual ballots, and bilingual education. The broader and socially more divisive achievement, however, was to call into question the immigrant's traditional attitude about its' relationship to America. As Linda Chavez notes in Out of the Barrio, "Until quite recently, there was no question but that each group desired admittance to the mainstream. No more. Now ethnic leaders demand that their groups remain separate, that their native culture and language be preserved intact, and that whatever accommodation takes place be on the part of the receiving society."

This tale is not yet complete. An interesting footnote occurred last month in a preliminary hearing on Proposition 187 that took place in Los Angeles. At issue was implementation of the initiative's provisions to prohibit alien school enrollment, to eliminate free access to non-emergency medical services and in-state tuition rates for college-bound illegal aliens, and to facilitate the reporting of illegal aliens to the INS. All of these developments were the result of MALDEF's expansion of Hispanic rights over the last 20 years. Arguing the case to suspend the voters' will and defend Ford's and MALDEF's legacy was Peter Schey of the National Lawyer's Guild."

Craig L. Hymowitz is a staff writer with the Investigative Journalism Project of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

http://www.americanpatrol.com/REFERENCE ... owitz.html