Miscarriage of justice

During a newspaper internship this summer in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., I was called to report on national news in a city 45 minutes to the south, where an important court case hung in the balance. The story, like most good stories, began with one person trying to get things changed.\nThat person was Lou Barletta, the Republican mayor of the small eastern Pennsylvania city of Hazleton. \nAccording to Barletta, illegal immigration in the area has reached epidemic proportions in recent years, resulting in an increase in crime and undue stress on the city’s public services. So just over two years ago, the city council of Hazleton passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which required landlords and business to only rent to and hire legal citizens. The ordinance also declared English the official language of Hazleton.\nThis local ordinance, which made national headlines as the first attempt to curb illegal immigration on a city level, was quickly challenged in federal court by a concerted effort of various legal teams. Everyone from the American Civil Liberties Union and Philadelphia law firm Cozen O’Connor to the Hazleton Area Latino Taskforce and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund represented Hazleton’s anonymous undocumented immigrants in court. \nAn exodus by undocumented immigrants in the last year away from Hazleton left the city noticeably empty when I arrived that day, almost the way Kirkwood looks when classes end for the summer.\nGood, then, that people like the ACLU stepped in to the take the side of these immigrants. Furthermore, what a sign of understanding that a federal judge found the Hazleton ordinance unconstitutional – a decision Barletta has promised to take all the way to the Supreme Court.\nBut before you pass judgment, know that the same lawyers who were seemingly only interested in the welfare of the undocumented immigrants of Hazleton have now slapped a $2.4 million lawsuit on the city to recoup legal costs. Barletta has accused the plaintiffs of trumping up the numbers by bringing in an unnecessarily large number of lawyers in an effort to bankrupt the city of Hazleton. \nThis is what Mayor Barletta gets for trying to uphold the laws of the United States of America. The same federal government that has done nothing to stop illegal immigration has now turned a blind eye while Barletta and the legal citizens of Hazleton are attacked by greedy, selfishly motivated liberal attack dogs.\nMy empathy for illegal immigrants can only go so far when their biggest supporters are the enterprising scum of the earth at the ACLU. What do you do when the federal government does nothing? When the judicial branch of that same government throws you to the wolves?\nStates’ rights are dead in this country. A man like Lou Barletta can no longer defend his town and protect his people. Reviving states’ rights is the plight of our greatest state and local leaders, and if nothing more is done in regard to immigration, it will quickly become the revolution of our generation.