Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS. : CITIES : Police Citing Men at Corner
The policy at Santa Ana City Hall is to discourage the crowd of Latinos that for years has gathered at 5th and Euclid streets to wait for potential employers to drive by and pick up day workers.
Santa Ana police cracked down on the crowd after neighbors and nearby merchants complained that the men loiter, block traffic and drive away customers. Merchants said some customers were badgered and that some of the men were urinating in public.
Some Latinos complained that police were indiscriminate, citing men simply walking by the scene or sitting on bus benches waiting for buses. They said the men must wait on street corners for work because they have no cars to travel to job sites.
A police spokesman responded that the men could fight the citations in court. He added that police were not turning the illegal aliens over to immigration officials, a long-standing policy of the department.
The next day, federal Immigration and Naturalization Service agents raided the corner and took 27 men into custody.
Such raids are the focus of a lawsuit first filed from Orange County in 1979 that, coincidentally, mushroomed last week. At stake is the constitutionality of INS tactics when it conducts sweeps in search of illegal aliens.
A Los Angeles federal court judge ruled that the Orange County lawsuit could be expanded into a class-action suit covering “all persons of Latin ancestry” throughout the judicial district, which extends from Orange County to San Luis Obispo County.
The ruling came from the same judge, David W. Williams, who in 1980 ruled that the INS “engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” which forbids unreasonable search and seizure.
Latino activists allege that INS agents arrest Latinos who are citizens merely because of their appearance, and that agents enter homes and businesses without receiving consent or a search warrant. The lawsuit stemmed Orange County incidents
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