INS Turns a Deaf Ear to Horse Trainers’ Plea to Meet

Thoroughbred horse trainers at Southern California’s major race tracks are seeking a meeting with U.S. immigration officials to clarify the status of a temporary worker program that was jeopardized by the arrest Friday of 119 illegal aliens at San Luis Rey Downs.

But U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials say there is nothing to clarify and they have no intention of “changing the rules after the game has started,” in the words of Ernest Gustafson, INS district director for Los Angeles.

On the contrary, say INS officials, if the immigration agency continues to believe, as it does now, that trainers and horse owners are violating the program by continuing to hire undocumented workers to groom and exercise horses, it will resume the kind of “backstretch” raids--in the non-public areas of the race track--that led to the arrest of nearly 300 illegal aliens last year at the Del Mar and Santa Anita race tracks and a disruption of the tracks’ lucrative racing schedules.

In the aftermath of those raids, the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Assn., which represents trainers and horse owners, agreed to participate in a special temporary worker program with the U.S. Department of Labor, the state Employment Development Department and the INS. It is that program, called H-2, which is at issue.

The program--patterned after an ongoing program that permits foreign athletes and entertainers to work in this country--allows foreign workers to receive special visas permitting them to work at the Del Mar Race Track, Santa Anita in Arcadia and Hollywood Park in Inglewood, but only from January to Oct. 1 of this year. (The program was later expanded to include smaller tracks such as Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows in Northern California and Los Alamitos in Orange County.)

During this nine-month period, the HBPA trainers are supposed to wean themselves from using undocumented workers by finding, training and hiring legal workers, be they American citizens or resident aliens.

So far, HBPA officials say, they have used newspaper ads to recruit about 1,000 new legal workers to the ongoing one-week free training sessions, but because taking care of thoroughbreds is hard work and the pay is low, only about 250 people have agreed to take the jobs, and most of them have started at the bottom as hot walkers, earning $130 to $170 a week.

Although INS officials such as Gustafson say they have been concerned about the “continuing use of illegals” at some of the tracks sanctioned only for H-2 alien workers, it wasn’t until the raid Friday at San Luis Rey Downs Thoroughbred Training Center in Bonsall that the INS made those concerns public. Harold Ezell, INS western regional commissioner, blasted the trainers, accusing them of falling back into their old pattern of relying on undocumented workers.

Of the 119 people arrested, only three had H-2 visas--which were useless at the training facility. As a result, Ezell said, the entire program is in jeopardy.

Doug Atkins, the HBPA’s secretary-treasurer, said in an interview this week that his group was “really disturbed by what (Ezell) said. It’s the first time we’ve heard anything about the program being in jeopardy. We have been cooperating and the (training) program was working.”

The HBPA’s trainers were under the impression, Atkins said, that “auxiliary tracks” such as San Luis Rey Downs, where trainers take horses for training, stabling and rehabilitation from the three major tracks--Del Mar, Hollywood Park and Santa Anita--also were covered by the H-2 program.

“We didn’t realize San Luis Rey was off limits,” Atkins said. Auxiliary sites like San Luis Rey Downs are an integral part of horse racing in the state and “some outfits can’t function without them.”

“It’s a situation where these guys follow the horse. A trainer says, ‘Jose, take the horse down to San Luis Rey Downs,’ ” Atkins explained. “He’s doing the job he would be doing at a designated track like Hollywood Park and Santa Anita.”

Leonard Foote, secretary for the California Horse Racing Board, the state agency responsible for regulating race tracks, said he also was under the impression that the H-2 visas covered off-track facilities such as San Luis Rey Downs. But Foote also said that trainers are having a difficult time recruiting Americans to take the jobs.

“It’s apparent we have a very difficult time recruiting grooms and horse handlers who are Americans,” Foote said. “I wouldn’t expect the entire program would be in jeopardy, however, over what happened at one facility.”

Joe O’Kane, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who represents the HBPA and who is attempting to set up a meeting with INS officials, said the new training program has begun to make a “substantial change in the makeup of the backside” of the three major race tracks and that it will take a few years to change the work force of the state’s horse racing industry.

“We want to find out exactly what problems the INS believes exist,” said O’Kane. “We’re trying to clarify the situation.”

Gustafson, the INS official, says there is little to clarify. “They know better than that,” he said. “They were told very clearly the (H-2) permits were for the three tracks. They are trying to add things now but it’s not going to work.”

And Gustafson said it’s unlikely the INS will extend the program beyond Oct. 1. “We never had any intention of doing that. We don’t see any need to do it,” said Gustafson. “The intent was that, once and for all, there would be legal citizens working. They’ve had several months since January . . . and it’s in their best interest to get it done.”

In all, about 600 workers hold the H-2 permits, most of them in Southern California, said Foote, adding that the HBPA has requested certification from the U.S. Department of Labor for about 250 more.

Under the H-2 plan, the labor department certifies that Americans are unavailable to fill many of the backstretch jobs at California tracks.