INS Blasts City Proposal on Sanctuary

Top federal immigration officials, in their harshest attack yet on the growing sanctuary movement, today lambasted as “ridiculous and disastrous” a City Council proposal to declare the City of Los Angeles a sanctuary for Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees.

A final vote on the proposal is scheduled for Wednesday.

“This is a ridiculous and disastrous kind of thing for a city council to do that has no business being involved in national policy in the first place,” Harold Ezell, western regional commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, declared at a press conference today.

“Los Angeles is the illegal (alien) capital of America in the first place,” he said. “This would send a message out that ‘L.A.’s the Place’ to be free from the INS. . . . How can city officials promote the violation of federal law?”

Antonovich Present

Ezell made his remarks at a press conference he said he had called to “bring (the proposal) to the attention of the citizenry of Los Angeles.” Also attending the conference was INS District Director Ernest Gustafson of Los Angeles and county Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

Antonovich said he planned to propose to the Board of Supervisors a resolution that would officially put the board on record as opposing any effort to declare Los Angeles County a sanctuary, and in favor of a current immigration reform bill that would make it illegal for employers to hire illegal aliens.

The City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a resolution proposal by Councilman Michael Woo that would declare Los Angeles a “city of sanctuary” for Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees fleeing political persecution in their countries.

The resolution was unanimously adopted on Friday by the Intergovernmental Relations Committee, which Woo chairs. In forwarding the resolution, Woo said he hoped to encourage the estimated 250,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalan immigrants in Los Angeles to report crimes to police without fear of being deported.