Immigrant law's foes seek legal fees
They asked a judge to award them their costs in forcing Hazleton to rescind the measure.
Plaintiffs who successfully sued to overturn Hazleton's illegal-immigrant law want the city to pay more than $2.3 million in legal fees.
U.S. District Judge James Munley struck down the Illegal Immigration Relief Act in July, ruling it unconstitutional. Hazleton has appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs asked Munley yesterday to award them more than $2.3 million in fees and an additional $45,000 in related costs.
Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta called the request absurd and said the city would fight it. Barletta has raised $400,000 for the city's legal defense fund, of which about $150,000 has been spent.
The plaintiffs' petition "illustrates the circus the ACLU brought to this case," Barletta said. "They had 20 attorneys sitting in the courtroom at a time, 16 of them doing nothing but running up the bill."
The petition lists 37 lawyers as having worked on the case, most of them from the Philadelphia firm Cozen O'Connor, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
They billed a total of 7,613 hours.
The lawyers defended their fee request as reasonable, saying the city repeatedly amended its ordinance in an effort to put it on sounder legal footing - making more work for them.
Hazleton, a city of 30,000 about 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, had sought to impose fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and deny business permits to companies that give them jobs. Another measure would have required tenants to register with City Hall and pay for a rental permit.
Hazleton's act was copied by dozens of municipalities around the nation that contend the federal government hasn't done enough to stop illegal immigration.