Question by Vanessa: Can you believe this Plaintiffs want Hazleton to pay .4 M in fees?
The attorneys who successfully challenged Hazleton’s illegal immigration ordinance in federal court want the city to pay their legal fees and costs totaling close to $ 2.4 million.

A 28-page petition filed in federal court Friday blames the city for driving up the fees for the attorneys pursuing the case, who represented several of Hazleton’s Hispanic residents, landlords and community groups.

Since passing the first ordinance of its kind in July 2006, the city passed at least three additional versions of the ordinance in an attempt to improve its chances of winning the lawsuit. The often unexpected changes made the case more labor intensive and expensive, the plaintiffs argue.

“Hazleton has used this Court as its laboratory,” the fee petition reads. “Defendant’s experimentation over the past year comes at a price.”

U.S. District Judge James M. Munley declared the Illegal Immigration Relief Act unconstitutional in a 206-page opinion released July 26, ruling it violated due process rights and infringed on the federal government’s sole authority to regulate immigration. In federal civil rights cases, prevailing plaintiffs can ask the judge to force the defendant to pay for their legal fees.

Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta, whose city operates on a tightly constrained $ 7.9 million budget, called the $ 2.4 million fee total “absurd,” adding the city plans to challenge the amount plaintiffs requested.

“It illustrates the circus the ACLU brought to the case,” said Barletta. “They had over 20 attorneys sitting in the courtroom, with plenty of them doing nothing but running up the bill. Their goal was to bankrupt the city of Hazleton.”

Lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs Witold “Vic” Walczak, of the ACLU, defended the fees as reasonable, saying they were reduced by $ 500,000 from what could have been requested.

“We didn’t bill for all the lawyers in the courtroom,” he said.

Munley has the discretion to award a higher or lower fee total if he wishes. The city has appealed Munley’s ruling and won’t have to pay any fees until the case is resolved.

http://citizensvoice.com/site/index…
In light of the fact that Hazletons problem is every Americans problem and was largely created by the point blank refusal of the Federal government to enforce standing laws. The Bush administration should this bill, out of their own pockets.
GW could stop this.
Does it get more corrupt? It looks like the law abiding citizens are characterized as the law breakers. What happened to a citizens arrest? Or is it up to the federal government to enforce the law and only the federal government. Something is broken here.

Best answer:

Answer by josehernandez243
In my opinion, the only thing worse than a lawyer is a Mexican lawyer.

Give your answer to this question below!

 

 

PNP: Protect and Prevent (Part 2 of 2) – During the Spring of 2010, Hempstead High School and A.B.G. Schultz Middle School students from the Hispanic Counseling Center created a bilingual public ser…

 

Scholarship Fund's Director Carrying on Social Justice Legacy

Filed under: hispanic counseling center

Another new APIASF staff member is Gayle Yamada, director of development, who most recently worked in a similar position for the Los Angeles-based Little Tokyo Service Center, which provides culturally sensitive social services, such as family …
Read more on Diverse: Issues in Higher Educatio

 

Changing times: interracial marriages

Filed under: hispanic counseling center

Several critiques of the film quoted Goal Auzeen Saedi, a post-doctoral fellow in counseling at Stanford University, who believes that such pairings send an "underlying message about power, dominance and white privilege". There were more than 4.5 …
Read more on China Daily