Terrorizing Bus Riders

The Immigration and Naturalization Service sent its Border Patrol agents to Santa Ana last week to stop and board Orange County Transit District buses in search of illegal aliens. The raids were threats to the civil liberties of all bus riders.

The raids were overseen by Harold Ezell, the publicity-hungry western regional commissioner for the INS in Los Angeles.

Ezell has raided farms and factories in the county. And he is stepping up his operations here against the street-corner gatherings where some illegal aliens mass to be picked up by employers who drive by looking for day laborers to hire. As of last Thursday there had been four INS raids in eight days.

And in about the same time there have been three cases of armed INS agents stopping local buses on their regular routes to search for illegal immigrants.

That’s a disruptive tactic that terrorizes all passengers, regardless of their ethnic background or residency status.

Agents claim they only stop buses that suspected illegal residents board attempting to escape INS sweeps.

That, however, doesn’t explain why agents last Thursday surrounded one bus being ridden by only one passenger who, according to the driver, had been on the bus for several stops.

The recent bus boardings are reminiscent of a raid about one year ago when Ezell turned his agents loose in downtown Santa Ana to pull people out of the OCTD bus depot and off buses on the street.

At that time a pregnant woman was taken off a bus with her young child, only to be released later when she was able to produce papers to prove her legal residency. Last Thursday another pregnant woman was taken from a bus, detained and later released under similar circumstances.

The raids will no doubt turn up some illegal aliens. That’s not not hard to do anywhere in Southern California. But at what price?

Raiding local buses more than 100 miles from the border won’t effectively control immigration. And, to use bureaucratic jargon, the bus raids are not “cost-effective,” which means the results simply don’t justify the expense and enforcement effort.

The bus raids harass and otherwise inconvenience all passengers, including native-born residents and immigrants here legally.