In a symbolic victory for the undocumented immigrant community residing in the United States, the country's Supreme Court refused to listen to appeals on two ordinances against illegal immigrants in Pennsylvania and a Dallas suburb.
The appeals of the cities of Farmers Branch in Texas and Hazleton in Pennsylvania, cities that for eight years have tried to legally forbid undocumented immigrants from renting homes and to remove the licenses of businesses that hire them.
According to the Miami Herald, the city of Hazleton approved the first of these ordinances in 2006 in an attempt to curb the increasing number of immigrants in northeastern Pennsylvania through fines against landlords who rented homes to illegal residents.
Besides this measure, the ordinance pretended to refuse permits to businesses who employed undocumented labor.
On its part, in 2007, Farmers Branch, a suburb in Dallas, Texas, emitted an ordinance to forbid the rent of apartments to undocumented immigrants. As in the case of Hazleton, the measures never went into effect owing to a series of objections in courts that ended in a legal fight that went on for eight years until the Supreme Court's final verdict on Monday.
With this final result both ordinances are rendered ineffective in a trial that cost the city of Hazleton, of 29,000 students, at least $6 million dollars, according to NPR.
"Our hope was that the city would close this regrettable chapter of its history and begin to embrace the demographic changes in the community as a part of a more dynamic and inclusive future," said William A. Brewer III, partner of the legal firm Bickel & Brewer Storefront, through a press release.
Since 2012, the US Supreme Court has established that immigration matters are subjects that fundamentally must be dealt with at a federal level, not local.
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