INS Arrests 169 at Santa Anita : Pressure Put on Trainers Who Hire Illegal Aliens

In a continuing campaign to pressure racehorse trainers into curbing their dependence on illegal aliens, the Immigration and Naturalization Service staged a pre-dawn raid at Santa Anita race track in Arcadia on Wednesday, detaining 169 suspected illegal aliens who live and work at the track.

It was the third time in two months that the INS has targeted a Southern California track. Agents detained 123 suspected illegal aliens working for trainers at Del Mar race track in San Diego County on Aug. 23 and detained another 50 during the 18-day meet at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds race track in Pomona in September.

Del Mar was forced to cancel a lucrative Saturday of races the day after it was raided, but a spokeswoman for Santa Anita said neither Wednesday’s schedule nor future days of the track’s Oak Tree Meet will be affected.

The two-hour raid, conducted by a task force of 140 INS and U.S. Border Patrol agents, covered 30 buildings, including stables and dorms. Some of the suspects ran from agents and hid under bales of hay in the stables, while others fled to a nearby park. The raid was staged at 2:30 a.m., long before any track activity begins, to avoid any danger to horses.

About 2,000 grooms, hotwalkers, exercise riders and others are employed by trainers to work with horses at Santa Anita. Many of the workers live in facilities there.

INS officials believe 600 to 800 are illegal aliens and said their raid would have netted far more, but trainers--anticipating the raid--had moved many of the workers to quarters they maintain at Hollywood Park in Inglewood days earlier. The INS believes word of the raid had leaked to the trainers.

‘Flagrant Disregard’

Western Regional INS Commissioner Harold Ezell said Santa Anita trainers had exhibited “flagrant disregard” of his agency’s demands for cutbacks on the employment of illegal aliens.

Ezell said a joint task force of the INS and the California Horse Racing Board will screen all license renewals of trainer employees at the end of the season to be sure the employees are citizens or legal aliens.

He promised more raids in the future in an effort “to send a clear and strong message to the racing industry . . . that American citizens and other permanent residents” should have first crack at track jobs.

Since 1982, under its Operations Jobs program, the INS has been staging well-publicized raids of factories and other workplaces where illegal aliens are believed to hold jobs that might be attractive to Americans.

The INS has been campaigning to persuade Congress to pass a law making it illegal for an employer to knowingly hire an illegal alien. Congress has refused to pass such legislation as part of an immigration-reform measure.

Employer Sanctions Urged

“We need employer sanctions,” Ezell said Wednesday.

The horse-racing industry contends that there is a shortage of American citizens experienced in handling horses and that many immigrants from Mexico’s rural areas are far better suited to track jobs. Trainers recently petitioned the U.S. Department of Labor to certify that such a shortage exists among Americans, a move that would allow temporary working visas to be issued to illegals employed at race tracks.

The INS contends the trainers favor hiring illegal aliens because they accept lower wages and poorer working conditions.

An angry Ezell on Wednesday accused trainers of providing better conditions for their horses than for their stable workers, and INS Los Angeles District Director Ernest Gustafson charged that “many track employers are known to pay their illegal alien workers slave wages.”

Don Johnson, executive director of the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protection Assn., which represents trainers, said no employee at a race track is paid less than $5 an hour. He acknowledged that on-track housing, which is provided free to employees who wish to use it, “is not the greatest,” with some quarters lacking toilets or running water.

‘Big Double-Cross’

Johnson complained that the raid was a “big double-cross.”

He said that in response to INS pressure against employment of illegals, his organization “had worked out an informal, verbal agreement with the INS” before Santa Anita’s Oak Tree Meet began Oct. 2. The horsemen’s group set up a hiring hall and a training school aimed at recruiting American citizens and legal residents in an attempt to gradually reduce the number of illegal alien track workers.

“We had no idea the INS had any fault with what we were doing,” said Ronald Bonaparte, an attorney representing the horsemen’s association. “I was flabbergasted” by the raid, he said.

Added Johnson, “There’s been a breach of faith on the part of the INS.” Ezell denied that there was any such agreement between the INS and the trainers. He said only a few trainers are taking steps to curb their use of illegal aliens.

Del Mar Agreement

An agreement between the INS and Del Mar trainers was reached after the raid there.

Trainers agreed to provide the INS with proof of citizenship for new hires and to keep aliens deported in the raid from returning to their old jobs--steps Ezell said Santa Anita trainers had refused to take. Because the Del Mar agreement came near the end of the track’s season, its impact there was not immediately clear.

Cliff Goodrich, Santa Anita’s assistant general manager, said some trainers lost most or all of their workers in Wednesday’s raid.

One trainer, Sal Gonzalez, who has seven horses at Santa Anita, said both his grooms had been taken away during the raid.

“They were very good men, both from Mexico. They had worked with horses all their lives,” he said. “This means I’ll have to do everything myself until I can find someone to replace them--groom the horses, walk them, exercise them, clean the stables. I can do it for a day or two, but I’ve got too many horses for one man to handle.”

Mexicans in Majority

The INS said that the majority of those seized at Santa Anita were Mexicans, with others from Guatemala, El Salvador, New Zealand, Brazil, England, the Philippines and Holland.

An INS spokesman said 165 men and four women were detained. Sixty-eight agreed to accept voluntary deportation, while the rest will face deportation hearings before a federal immigration judge. Because it has no room in its Los Angeles facility, the INS Wednesday night bused half of the men to its El Centro center and the other half to a center in Florence, Ariz. The women were housed at a facility in Pasadena.

The horsemen’s association and the Oak Tree Racing Assn., which operates the Santa Anita meet, said late Wednesday that they would file a federal court motion today seeking to invalidate the raid by claiming it was based on an inadequate search warrant. At issue is the fact that the warrant did not contain the names of those taken into custody.