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More on the Third Circuit Striking Down Hazleton’s Anti-Immigrant Ordinance

Posted September 9, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

I am reading the full decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit striking down an anti-immigrant ordinance in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and I’ll have a full report on that later. But since it will take me a couple of hours to digest the full opinion, I just wanted to point out a few things right away:

1. The court did not spare any verbiage in this decision. It is 188 pages long, including attachments.

2. The A Team was arguing it from the anti-immigrant side. Kris Kobach, former Bush administration official, current law professor, and head of the Kansas GOP, was the lead attorney. He wrote Arizona’s SB 1070 and he is the liar who claimed SB 1070 “just follows the federal law,” and who says that the anti-immigrant laws he’s involved with are bulletproof. He is also the lawyer Sheriff Joe Arpaio was paying $300. Seeing him shown to be so damned wrong is a bonus in itself. He has stirred the pot against immigrants for the last two years, much to his personal and professional profit.

3. Our side also had its own A Team. Lee Galernt from the ACLU has been crisscrossing the country since 2007 heading off one racist law after another. He is one of the real heroes of the legal fight to challenge the Know Nothings. People like Lucas Guttentag, who head the ACLU’s national Immigrant Rights Project, and others on the legal team are invaluable assets. You couldn’t afford their legal expertise in any other context. Jackson Chin at LatinoJustice has been a stalwart of the New York immigration bar for 25 years.

A copy of the full opinion is here.

Tags : kobach

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