Police chief: Mayor mum on illegals law
Matt Birkbeck
The Morning Call
Mar 21, 2007
Echoing other Hazleton officials, Police Chief Robert Ferdinand on Monday said that Mayor Lou Barletta didn't consult him on his ordinance cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Ferdinand, testifying on the sixth day of a federal nonjury trial, told U.S. District Judge James M. Munley he learned about the ordinance in passing from Barletta's secretary just before it was introduced to City Council last summer.
''The mayor never mentioned it to me,'' Ferdinand said under questioning by Thomas Fiddler, an attorney for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Hazleton's Illegal Immigration Relief Act.
Fiddler and other lawyers testing whether the law is constitutional argued that Barletta kept Ferdinand and other members of the mayor's inner circle in the dark. Those officials include Planning and Public Works Director Robert Dougherty and City Administrator Sam Monticello.
Barletta testified last week that he felt compelled to act on his belief that illegal immigrants were the cause of rising crime and violence in the city, particularly after four illegal immigrants were charged in the May 2006 shooting death of a Hazleton man.
He also said that 30 percent of all drug arrests in Hazleton in 2005 and 2006 involved illegal immigrants.
But Ferdinand said Barletta never asked him for statistics to prove his theory, nor did the mayor ask for his opinion about the cause of increased violence in the city.
''I never gave him statistics on illegal immigrants,'' Ferdinand said.
Hazleton's population has increased by 50 percent since 2001, with an estimated 10,000 new arrivals, most of them Hispanics from the New York metropolitan area.
Ferdinand said the city does not include a person's immigration status in arrest reports and he had no idea how many illegal immigrants have been arrested in Hazleton since 2001. He said he could only identify more than two dozen arrests of illegal immigrants in that period, based on notes officers made in their reports.
Ferdinand's testimony, which continues today, ended a long day that included experts testifying that illegal immigrants reduce wages and that immigration law is far too complicated for a city to administer.
Hazleton's ordinance, barred pending the outcome of the trial, imposes fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and on businesses that hire them.
The plaintiffs-- the American Civil Liberties Union, Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund and several Hispanic businesses and Hazleton residents -- are seeking to permanently bar the law, arguing immigration law is the domain of the federal government.
