HAZLETON, Pa.—Armored with a bulletproof vest and feisty Italian determination, Mayor Lou Barletta made his way past hundreds of dueling protesters, past rows of state police mounted on horseback, and into City Hall.
It was July 13, 2006, and the Art Moderne-style building was overflowing with spectators and teeming with news reporters, Mr. Barletta said. The mayor, then 50 years old, was beholding a spectacle unlike any he had seen in his eastern Pennsylvania hometown.
“It was surreal. I am thinking, ‘How did I ever get here, to this point?’ You know, how did it come to this?” Mr. Barletta said, reflecting on the day the Hazleton City Council approved a controversial first-in-nation ordinance aimed at discouraging illegal immigration.
“I thought I was just doing something for people in my town,” he said, “and realized that I became a voice for people across this country.”
Mr. Barletta’s proposal, which sought to punish businesses and landlords who failed to verify the immigration status of employees or renters, thrust Hazleton into the international spotlight. The ordinance inspired dozens of U.S. communities to attempt similar action, spawning intense legal and political battles that lasted years.
His seemingly simple attempt to address a local problem evolved into a personal crusade that had national implications. Mr. Barletta’s story sheds light on the political paralysis that continues to plague the issue nearly two decades later.
Political Roots
Political history professor Jeff Bloodworth said there seemed to be little awareness of illegal immigration when Mr. Barletta first began sounding alarms.“Lou Barletta kind of was the canary in the coal mine,” the professor from Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Barletta proposed Hazleton’s law nine years before billionaire Donald Trump made his first presidential run and began pounding on the illegal immigration issue. The issue is now a core tenet of the Republican platform in races up and down the ballot.
A lifelong resident of Hazleton, Mr. Barletta, 68, makes no apologies for taking on illegal immigration.
Populists such as Mr. Barletta are “often very plain-spoken, unvarnished people who don’t see themselves as career politicians,” Mr. Bloodworth said. “He’s rough-hewn; he’s controversial.”
Mr. Barletta’s ancestors emigrated legally from Italy, he said.
Thus, Mr. Barletta says, he has nothing against people who come to the United States seeking a better life and following the law to do so.
Yet some critics unfairly and inaccurately judged him, he said.
“It was hurtful to be called ‘racist’ and ‘a bigot’ and ‘anti-immigrant,’ when I was actually fighting for immigrants—legal immigrants,” Mr. Barletta said. “I was their voice.”
Mr. Barletta’s groundbreaking stand against illegal immigration started in his little corner of Pennsylvania, about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia. His fight eventually led him to a congressional seat, followed by a role in the transition team for President-elect Trump in 2016 and 2017.
Looking back on his quest, Mr. Barletta says he remains convinced that he did the right thing for the right reasons.
Trouble Brewing
Mr. Barletta came from a Democrat household. But he liked Republican President Ronald Reagan. He and some others in his family aligned with the GOP.In the 1990s, he and his wife ran a successful pavement-marking business, and he thought local government policies were discouraging entrepreneurs.
“I got mad and ran for City Council,” said Mr. Barletta. He won election in 1997, his second try as a Republican in a Democrat-dominated area.
“Then I decided that I had to run for mayor because I couldn’t make enough changes as a city councilman.”
After winning the 1999 mayoral race, Mr. Barletta sold his business so he could focus on the city’s problems. When he took office in 2000, he confronted a $1.2 million deficit, blighted conditions, and discontent among residents.
The population was growing while tax revenues remained flat—an indicator that “we have an illegal immigration problem,” Mr. Barletta said.
He learned that illegal immigrants were coming from neighboring New York and New Jersey.
They were drawn to Hazleton’s lower cost of living, small town lifestyle, and plentiful manual labor jobs that required little or no English. Because Hazleton sits near the crossroad of Interstates 80 and 81, it is home to many product distribution centers.
Although U.S. Census data showed only a modest increase in Hazleton’s population, Mr. Barletta says there is reason to dispute those numbers. Illegal immigrants often dodge the census, “obviously out of fear of being deported,” Mr. Barletta said, calling this “a problem that still exists today.”
He considers data from schools and social programs to be more accurate. Based on those numbers, the city’s population probably grew 35 percent in less than five years, from about 23,000 to about 31,000, Mr. Barletta said.
The growth of the Hazleton schools’ program for English as a second language is one indicator. It ran on a budget of about $500 a year, “because there was never a need for it,” he recalled. Five years later, the program’s budget burgeoned to $1.5 million.
The city’s police, fire, and health care services were all being stretched to serve thousands more people “without an extra dollar of revenue,” Mr. Barletta said. “Every aspect of life here changed.”
Violent crime and drug trafficking were rising; gangs were moving in.
People no longer felt safe—a point that a perturbed constituent underscored for Mr. Barletta.
One morning, shortly after his second term as mayor began in 2004, as he pulled his vehicle into the City Hall parking lot, an elderly woman stood in his designated spot.
“And when I got out of the car, she started hitting me in the chest with her finger,” he recalled. Referring to illegal immigration causing safety concerns, she told him: “You'd better do something about this, buster. I can’t even sit on my front porch any longer.”
The woman’s words stung. “My heart was broken,” Mr. Barletta said. “I mean, this was a city I was born and raised in.”
He sought help from state and national officeholders. He even traveled to Washington and met with federal authorities in December 2005. “But I could not get one elected official to come help me,” he said. “In fact, they did the opposite; they stayed away.”
Crime in the City
A few months after Mr. Barletta visited Washington, Hazleton reached a tipping point.Typically, this former coal-mining and lumber town, perched at the state’s highest elevation, might get one murder every seven years. Then “people would spend the next six years talking about it,” he said.
But two back-to-back incidents shocked citizens’ sensibilities on “a day I will never forget,” Mr. Barletta said.
Early on May 10, 2006, at the Pine Street Playground, a 14-year-old boy allegedly fired shots from a gun. No one was injured, but Mr. Barletta said he was horrified that it happened while children were playing there, just as he had played there during his boyhood.
Later that night, Derek Kichline, a 29-year-old father of three, was shot and killed outside his Chestnut Street home, and the suspect was an illegal immigrant.
Police worked 36 straight hours to solve the crimes, followed by a federal drug raid that snared illegal immigrants, Mr. Barletta said.
These crimes outraged the populace, he said, given the context.
Mr. Kichline’s slaying became the second in an eight-month span, and it had followed a string of incidents blamed on illegal immigrants. And, for Mr. Barletta, that was the last straw.
Searching for Solutions
To uphold his oath as mayor, he said he felt a responsibility to act.“I told my wife I had lost control of this town,” he recalled. “I had nowhere to go, and nobody to go to. ... I was literally on my own.”
Pondering what to do, Mr. Barletta said he thought about previous incidents involving illegal immigrants. Five years earlier, Mr. Barletta visited an apartment that had generated complaints.
What he saw sickened him: seven mattresses on the floor, cockroaches in the refrigerator, and other conditions “unfit for animals, let alone human beings,” he said.
He became convinced that landlords were exploiting illegal immigrants—and that employers were likely paying them subpar wages, too.
With this situation and others in mind, Mr. Barletta began looking for solutions following the May 2006 crimes. He and other researchers found an ordinance that officials in San Bernardino, California, had drafted but not approved.
And with that proposal, Mr. Barletta unwittingly touched off a firestorm.
Local Law, International Stir
The law had three prongs: companies caught hiring illegal immigrants would be denied business permits for five years; landlords would be fined $1,000 for each illegal immigrant whose status they failed to check; and English would be declared the official language of Hazleton.By a 4–1 vote, the City Council approved the ordinance on July 13, 2006. On that date, Hazleton’s City Hall resembled a fortress, Mr. Barletta recalled.
Reporters came from some of America’s biggest media outlets; one came from a newspaper based in Japan, he recalled. He said he was astounded to see satellite trucks surrounding City Hall when he arrived the next day.
“Communities are crying out for relief,” Mr. Barletta said in his Senate testimony. “Cities like Hazleton are the lifeblood of America. We are buckling under the strain of illegal immigration. We need help.”
But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) spearheaded legal challenges against many illegal immigration laws, including Hazleton’s.
The ACLU and other groups contended that Hazleton’s measure was unconstitutional and discriminatory. Opponents also alleged that the ordinance “aroused suspicion of anyone who looked or sounded foreign, especially of the rapidly growing Hispanic population.”
“The law turned a quiet little town, rebounding from economic doldrums, into a battleground between natives and immigrants,” the ACLU said, alleging it created a “toxic” environment for Hazleton’s Hispanic residents.
But Mr. Barletta said many people, including legal immigrants, thanked him for trying to address a problem that affected their daily lives.
Many foreign-born people residing legally in the United States have told him that they resent illegal immigrants for skipping the required steps yet reaping benefits from America. But mainstream media outlets have often ignored that point, Mr. Barletta said.
“No matter how many times I say it, they won’t report it,” he said.
Ordinance Struck a Nerve
In his 2006 testimony to the U.S. Senate, Mr. Barletta said the impact of illegal immigration hits people hard nationwide—something he didn’t realize until word about Hazleton’s law spread.Within a few weeks of the ordinance’s approval, the city received more than 7,000 emails from all 50 states and “even from our brave soldiers fighting for our freedom overseas,” Mr. Barletta said.
Those messages were overwhelmingly supportive, Mr. Barletta said. But those who disliked the ordinance sometimes leveled threats at Mr. Barletta and his supporters.
“I slept with one eye open and a shotgun under my bed,” Mr. Barletta told The Epoch Times; police guarded the home where he lived with his wife and four daughters. “Those were scary times ... but I vowed to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court, which I ended up doing.”
Mr. Barletta created a legal defense fund. Cash and checks poured in, generating more than a quarter-million dollars in small donations.
One letter of support came from a military veteran. He sent $7 cash with a note saying, “This is everything I have in my wallet,” urging Mr. Barletta to continue his fight. Another contribution came from an elderly man who had been saving quarters for most of his life. He told his daughter to “send it to that mayor in Hazleton,” Mr. Barletta recalled.
“I realized that I had hit on something much deeper than I ever imagined, the nerve that I struck at the time,” Mr. Barletta said.
A judge put Hazleton’s law on hold while the legal battle raged and the vitriol flew.
Amid the uproar, a moment of clarity arrived for Mr. Barletta.
He had been invited to talk about illegal immigration in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, about 60 miles west of Hazleton. Afterward, a couple approached. They were the parents of Carly Snyder, a 20-year-old veterinary student who had lived in Milton, Pennsylvania, near Lewisburg.
“Through tears rolling down his cheeks, her father’s telling me what happened to her,” Mr. Barletta said, his voice cracking as he recounted the years-old tragedy.
The grieving father told Mr. Barletta, “I came here to shake your hand because you’re speaking for my daughter.”
Problem Can’t Be Gauged
Ms. Snyder’s killer was convicted, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole, court records show.But the case against the suspects in Mr. Kichline’s slaying fell apart. In 2007, prosecutors were forced to drop the charges, largely because of uncooperative or unavailable witnesses.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania, still pressing its case against the city’s ordinance, trumpeted the charges’ dismissal as a black eye for Mr. Barletta.
“The city’s own stats don’t back up Barletta’s claims that crime by illegal immigrants is destroying Hazleton, and now the anecdote that he has used over and over and over is gone,” the ACLU stated, adding that the issue that “rocketed him to fame fell apart right before his very eyes.”
But Mr. Barletta says the result meant no justice for Mr. Kichline. He also said the crime statistics weren’t detailed enough.
Critics would ask him: “How many illegal immigrants are there? How many crimes did they commit?” he recalled. And he would respond, “I don’t know; they’re not going to let Lou Barletta count them.”
In other words, the available data didn’t reflect reality, he said.
“Many of the questions were loaded and impossible for me to answer,” he said. But the problems he witnessed were undeniable, he said, adding that he saw the evidence in the hospitals, in the streets, and in the city budget.
His popularity in Hazleton soared. Four months after the case involving Mr. Kichline’s death imploded, Mr. Barletta won his third mayoral term with 90 percent of the vote.
Fight Moves to Bigger Arena
In 2010, while lawyers were still wrangling over Hazleton’s ordinance, Mr. Barletta won a seat in Congress. It was his third try against a longtime Democrat.Mr. Barletta was hopeful that he could achieve more in Congress. But after eight years in that role, he concluded that Democrats and Republicans both “lacked the political will” to address illegal immigration head-on.
“I really believe this: That the Democrats want the vote of illegal immigrants, and Republicans wanted cheap labor,” he said.
Neither political party has admitted to those alleged hidden motivations.
Repeatedly, Mr. Barletta’s efforts to implement changes were blocked. His immigration law went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent it back to an appeals court. Ultimately, in 2013, the appellate court reaffirmed its earlier decision, holding that immigration is a federal matter and that the city had overstepped its bounds.
In March 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take another look at the appellate court’s ruling.
Ironically, the law that Mr. Barletta had championed for so long never took effect in his hometown because of the legal challenges. Some Hazleton-inspired laws did take effect, Mr. Barletta said, but he is unsure whether any remain in force.
Throughout his fight, Mr. Barletta said he wondered: “Why don’t we just do what the American people want us to do? ... But I was alone, you know, at the forefront.”
New Ally Emerges
That changed after June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced his first presidential run.He had never sought public office before. His critics didn’t take him seriously; some even mocked his candidacy as a publicity stunt.
But Mr. Barletta sensed from the get-go that the famous New Yorker had a winning message.
“The American people were irate, which helped propel Donald Trump when he started speaking that language,” Mr. Barletta said, referring to the future president’s campaign announcement.
“That was a seminal event,” Mr. Barletta said. “He said what people were thinking, and he was saying it on a national level; I couldn’t do that. ... I didn’t have the same platform that Donald Trump had.”
Although the “racist” label was also slapped onto then-candidate Trump, Mr. Barletta sensed the billionaire could become president.
“He struck an issue that no other politician on a national level was willing to make a priority,” Mr. Barletta said.
When debuting his candidacy, Mr. Trump said: “Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore.”
Speaking at a podium bearing his now-famous campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” he addressed problems that America was facing. High on the list was illegal immigration.
The future president said that the United States “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. ... They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,” he said. “They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we’re getting.”
Mr. Barletta became one of the first members of Congress to endorse the maverick politician, who won the presidency in 2016. “Everyone thought I was crazy at the time,” he said.
Biden, Trump Differ on Immigration
Now, as the former president seeks to regain the White House, many Republicans in Congress are fearful that “their constituents will throw them out if they don’t support Donald Trump,” Mr. Barletta said.President Biden, a Democrat, has countered that his actions are aimed at creating a more humane and fair immigration system.
Mr. Barletta, who left Congress in 2019 after his Senate bid failed, supports former President Trump.
“I think it’s going to take someone like Donald Trump, to get back in office to get something done,” Mr. Barletta said.
But he is critical of some fellow Republicans. Many who remain in office failed to support the immigration-control measures that Mr. Barletta had pushed in Congress, he said.
He Left a Legacy
The big battle Mr. Barletta fought is now in the rear-view mirror, but Mr. Barletta said it was worth the effort.“I'd do it again in a second, because it was right,” he said.
“I didn’t care that obviously it wasn’t politically correct by the politicians,” he said. “I was just trying to do something to help people here in Hazleton, when no one else would do it. ... I realized that, you know, it had to be me.”
Kevin Blanco Reyes, a 22-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who lives near Hazleton, said some people in and around the area still talk about Mr. Barletta’s efforts.
“I think, for the most part, he’s respected,” Mr. Blanco told The Epoch Times. That’s especially true when people look at the havoc that illegal immigrants are wreaking in New York City, 125 miles east of Hazleton, he said.
Mr. Blanco, a realtor who interviewed Mr. Barletta for a podcast, said he appreciated having an “honest conversation” about many issues, including Mr. Barletta’s fight against illegal immigration.
“Maybe the approach wasn’t the best, but again, I wouldn’t expect any mayor of Hazelton to try and stop illegal immigration; it’s just not something that a small town like ours is prepared to do,” he said. “But, in my opinion, he did the best he could.”
