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.”

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