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DALLAS — Three Latino voters will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider their challenge to how City Council members are elected in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb that is trying to oust illegal immigrants through a series of ordinances, their attorney said Wednesday.
The plaintiffs plan to seek an appeal before the nation’s highest court after a federal appeals court affirmed a ruling against their voting-rights lawsuit, said one of their attorneys, Domingo Garcia.Valentine Reyes, Irene Gonzalez and Gary Garcia allege that the at-large council system in Farmers Branch dilutes minority votes. They want to create single-member districts, in which a council member is elected to represent a specific section of the city.Their attorneys argued before a federal court in Dallas that Hispanics of voting age would form a majority of the voters in one of the proposed districts. On appeal, they contended that citizenship isn’t a requirement in showing that Latinos of voting age would make up the majority in the proposed district.A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument. In a ruling Tuesday, the New Orleans-based panel insisted that the minorities of voting age in a proposed district must be citizens and need to account for a majority of the total population of the district’s voting-age citizens."That’s really a change of how voting-rights law has been interpreted in the past and would make a very bad precedent if it was adopted," Garcia said.City officials were pleased with the decision. "We thought it was a correct and very good opinion," said C. Robert Heath, one of the city’s attorneys.The lawsuit was filed after the Farmers Branch council approved banning illegal immigrants from renting homes in the city, a rule that’s never been enforced because of lawsuits and a ruling preventing it. The plaintiffs said that if single-member districts had been in place, at least one Latino candidate would have been elected to the council and could have represented the ethnic group.Since 1970, Farmers Branch has changed from a small, predominantly Anglo community to a city of almost 28,000 people. U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that about 48 percent of Farmers Branch residents are Hispanic. The city’s mayor and council members are all Anglo.We thought it was a correct and very good opinion."
C. Robert Heath,Farmers Branch attorney
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