Mayor Who Targeted Illegal Immigrants Easily Wins Third Term

Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta easily won re-election Tuesday to a third term.{snip}

He also talked about the issue of illegal immigrants.

He said, “We’ve seen what illegal immigration has done to our small town quality of life and we have said, ‘No! We will not let this happen.”’ He said, “We will fight!”

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Yesterday, he defeated Libertarian candidate John Medashefski, a coffee shop owner who had argued that the city should drop its costly effort to push through a law targeting illegal immigrants.

Unofficial returns showed Barletta winning 90 percent of the vote to Medashefski’s 10 percent.

The city will apparently continue its illegal immigration fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with the apparent triumph Tuesday night of incumbent council members Joe Yannuzzi and Evelyn Graham.

The GOP team, who sailed to victory on a ticket with Republican Mayor Lou Barletta, have supported his stance on illegal immigration and appealing a federal judge’s decision to strike down the city’s illegal immigration ordinance as unconstitutional.

And that issue is what the challengers for the two council seats attribute to their loss by an approximate 2-1 margin, unofficial results show.

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“We gave it our best shot. We had some ideas we thought we could implement in the city. The voters spoke. The Democrats came out almost 2-1 to Republicans and they voted Republican,” [Democratic challenger Maureen] Pozzessere said.

Graham said she wasn’t surprised by the election results.

“As I’ve said a couple times before, we’ve been doing what the people of the city of Hazleton wanted us to do,” Graham said.

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Yannuzzi said he and Graham would “continue to do what we normally did in the past. That seems to be what the citizens of Hazleton are telling us, they like what we’re doing.”

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“We are in a position to fight the illegal immigration fight all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s bad news for the illegal aliens in Hazleton,” Barletta said.