Quaker Group Asks That County Become Refugee Sanctuary

A Quaker group is asking the Board of Supervisors to declare Orange County a sanctuary for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, partly in response to Americans for Border Control, an Orange-based group initiated by Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Harold Ezell.

David A. Munro, a spokesman for the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of the Orange County Friends Meeting (Quakers), said Friday his group has asked Board of Supervisors Chairman Ralph B. Clark to place the sanctuary issue on one of the board’s regular meeting agendas in September.

Seeks ‘Humane Gesture’

“It would permit this county to make a humane gesture to people known to be subject to possible torture and death” when deported to their home countries, the group’s petition stated.

Munro said his group knows it probably won’t get even one vote from the five-member board for declaring Orange County a sanctuary.

“Of course, we know that,” Munroe said. “I’ll tell you what sparked it. It is Ezell’s Americans for Border Control. We were talking about holding a press conference to attack Ezell for helping to create ABC in this county, but if you just attack, that gives them more publicity. This goes at it a better way.”

Ezell, western regional INS commissioner, immediately termed the pro-sanctuary effort “a tragic thing” and accused the City of Santa Ana of already providing unofficial sanctuary to illegal aliens.

“It (Santa Ana) is already the undeclared capital of illegal aliens,” Ezell said.

Ezell has been helping Americans for Border Control for more than a year. The group is dominated by his personal friends and members of his church. The group’s message: The numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border are slowly destroying American society and constituting an invasion costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

“The main issue, as the Friends Committee sees it, is the deleterious social effect of any local cooperation with the search-and-seizure operations conducted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, especially of refugees from war-torn countries,” the committee said in a written statement.

An end to such operations would free refugees to report crimes and cooperate with law enforcement instead of hiding from it and would free them to participate more extensively in efforts to curb communicable diseases and malnutrition, the statement added. It also would help solve the problem of “the failure to learn English,” it said.

Ezell and ABC co-founder Bill Butler said they would attend any Board of Supervisors hearing on the sanctuary issue.

“We’ll get enough people who feel as frustrated as we do about this subject there to make them (sanctuary proponents) wonder if they’re in a foreign country,” Butler said. Referring to violent attacks on INS agents by some people crossing the border, Butler added: “These people don’t need sanctuary. They need incarceration.”

Munroe said his Quaker group consists of about 100 members, 50 of whom show up regularly at meetings.

Sympathetic to Movement

He said members have been “sympathetic” to the sanctuary movement and have offered to transport refugees. But the group has not offered to shelter them because it rents its facilities.

Clark was unavailable Friday. However, Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said all five board members had received copies of the sanctuary petition and added: “I have trouble believing that this is something we’d rush into. . . . Thank God I’m not chairman of the board in 1986. This is something procedurally the chairman will have to deal with.”

Riley said he doubted that the proposed declaration of sanctuary would receive a single vote.

“My idea would be that we have a lot of budget problems, we have battered and abused children and homeless people who we already have trouble finding accommodations for, and this (sanctuary) is better left to individuals and religious groups. It’s always worked that way anyway,” Riley said.

Meanwhile, Ezell acknowledged that his remarks about Santa Ana being a capital for illegal aliens were aimed at city officials, including the police, who he said have created an informal form of sanctuary by failing to do anything about the large numbers of undocumented people living and working there.

Raps Police Management

“Police management caters to them,” Ezell said. “Nowhere else in the county do they do that.”

Santa Ana Police Chief Raymond C. Davis has long opposed INS sweeps in Santa Ana and has barred his department from participating in such actions.

Davis and his top assistants were unavailable Friday. A spokeswoman said the department would not be able to respond to Ezell’s comments until Tuesday.

Several cities, including San Francisco, have declared themselves to be sanctuaries, as has the state of New Mexico.

Last November, the Los Angeles City Council took the same action, but reversed itself in February after a protracted, bitter fight with Ezell and his supporters.