Judge strikes California city's law against day laborers
By BOB EGELKO
San Francisco Chronicle
04-MAY-06
A Southern California city's ban on day laborers' soliciting work from passing drivers violates freedom of speech, a federal judge has ruled.
The law in Redondo Beach, southwest of Los Angeles, stifles laborers' constitutional right to ask for work, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall of Los Angeles said in a ruling last week. She also said the ordinance was so broad that it could apply to children selling lemonade at a sidewalk stand or Girl Scouts selling cookies.
With the ban on seeking work from motorists, the city had no "adequate means by which the day laborers could solicit employment," Marshall said.
She said the city's argument that many day laborers were illegal immigrants, and thus not entitled to employment, was irrelevant because the constitutional guarantee of free speech is not limited by immigration status.
Labor and immigrant advocates praised the ruling Wednesday.
"Looking for work should not be a crime," said Pablo Alvarado, coordinator of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which was a plaintiff in the case. "We now have several judicial opinions agreeing, and we hope cities will refrain from engaging in further civil rights violations against day laborers."
But Redondo Beach City Attorney Michael Webb said the ordinance was copied almost word-for-word from an anti-solicitation law in Phoenix that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in 1986. He said he planned to appeal Marshall's ruling _ which found differences between the Redondo Beach and Phoenix laws _ to the Ninth Circuit, which oversees federal courts in nine Western states.
"This has been a problem for decades in Redondo, day laborers congregating and seeking employment," Webb said. He said the city had tried a variety of approaches, including strict enforcement of laws against blocking traffic and inviting federal agents to conduct immigration sweeps, before beginning a short-lived crackdown under its anti-soliciting ordinance in October 2004.
Marshall issued an injunction two months later halting enforcement while the suit was pending, an order that the Ninth Circuit upheld last May in a decision that did not address the constitutional issue. The appeals court could resolve that issue for the state and region, however, in a pending case involving a Glendale ordinance that another federal judge struck down in 2004.
The lawyer who challenged Redondo Beach's ordinance said a ban on labor solicitation in some areas of a city would be on stronger legal footing than a total ban.
But an ordinance that established a labor recruitment zone would still be unconstitutional "if they put it under a freeway where no one could possibly stop," said Robert Rubin, legal director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, who argued the case before Marshall.
"No one is saying anybody, including day laborers, can go into the street and cause traffic problems," Rubin said. "They do have the right to free speech . . . in the same way that someone hailing a cab does."
The Redondo Beach ordinance makes it a crime to solicit work, business or contributions from a public street or sidewalk, or to hire a person who solicits work.
Marshall said the city had other ways of pursuing its legitimate goals of traffic safety and crime prevention, such as enforcing existing laws against obstructing traffic, parking illegally and loitering.
(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, http://www.shns.com.)
Marshall, Consuelo Bland
I've heard "Negroponte" whispered a few times... the same guy that SAT on the Saddam docs for over 2 years and had to be told several times by Bush to release them.
I don't trust that guy...
Therein lies much of our problems, besides the do-nothing members of Congress who could write laws in such a manner that these judges could not sweep away.
What does this have to do with this thread????