Orange Mayor Puts Unspecified Time Limit on Roundups

Orange Mayor Jess F. Perez said Thursday that he would support for only a limited time the Police Department’s controversial crackdown on day laborers along Chapman Avenue.

“I don’t intend to support an ongoing, uninterrupted enforcement activity like we have now,” Perez said. “We have the rest of the city to police . . . we can’t afford it financially.”

Citing complaints from business owners and school district officials, as well as increased crime in the El Modena area, police since Feb. 24 have stopped scores of motorists and pedestrians along East Chapman Avenue on misdemeanor violations such as littering, jaywalking and having expired vehicle registrations. About 250 to 300 men, many of them illegal aliens, have been gathering daily along a one-mile stretch of the road in search of day jobs.

If those who are stopped cannot produce identification and police believe that they are illegal aliens, they are handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol near San Clemente, who in turn transport them to Mexico, in most cases. Six more were delivered to immigration authorities Thursday, bringing the total since the crackdown began to 132.

While indicating that he had some reservations about continuing the crackdown, Perez declined to be specific about when it might stop. “Unless the council chooses to disagree with his strategy, (Police Chief Wayne Streed) will continue as he sees fit,” Perez said.

The mayor’s comments came after the City Council held a closed-door meeting Thursday in City Manager J. William Little’s office to assess the policy, which has been roundly denounced by Latino and immigrants’ rights groups. Perez said the meeting was held in private because an American Civil Liberties Union attorney had threatened to seek a restraining order against the city earlier this week.

The city failed to notify some local media of the meeting, however, and had not posted the agenda for the special meeting in City Hall.

As the council was meeting, ACLU attorney Rebecca Jurado announced that her group would not take immediate legal action against the city. A meeting with city and police officials has been tentatively set for next Thursday, she said at a news conference on the lawn of La Purisima Catholic Church in Orange.

Nonetheless, Jurado criticized the city’s law enforcement policy.

“Never before has a city made such an affirmative effort to act as a self-appointed branch of the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) for the purpose of effecting quick deportations,” she said. “The true targets of this stepped-up enforcement are obviously those persons who the city believes are aliens. . . . If you are in the area and are of Latino appearance, that is evidence enough for you to be stopped by police, interrogated as to your legal status and have efforts started to have you deported.”

Perez, however, said police officials and special counsel Bruce D. Praet assured him Thursday that the city had not violated anyone’s constitutional rights and was well within its own powers to ask people--once they are stopped for some other violation--to produce identification, and if they cannot do so, to turn them over to immigration authorities.

But Perez also conceded that the crackdown will not solve the problems that led to its implementation.

“We recognize that we’re not going to stem the flow (of undocumented workers seeking day labor),” he said. “The objective is to be a deterrent to the unsavory conditions in that environment.”

Perez said the large numbers of poor, mostly Mexican immigrants who have streamed into the El Modena area over the past few years have created an environment in which criminals are able to thrive. If some otherwise law-abiding undocumented aliens are returned to Mexico in at attempt to rid the city of the criminal element, that is unfortunate, he said.

“I don’t deny that (will happen),” Perez said. “We can’t be perfect. There will probably be some people run through this process who don’t deserve it.”

About 100 Latino laborers attended the ACLU news conference after being told of the meeting Thursday morning by members of immigrants’ rights groups. One of them, 19-year-old Manuel Cardenas, said he was arrested, deported to Mexico and had to pay $300 to smuggle his way across the border the following day.

Speaking through an interpreter, Cardenas said he and a friend were approached by police about 11 a.m. last Friday as they walked along Chapman Avenue. He said officers in an unmarked police car handcuffed them and took them to the police station.

“We were walking on the sidewalk. They did not tell us what we had done wrong,” Cardenas said. “They said I should not be here in this county of Orange any more and don’t come back. They didn’t say anything about my rights.”

Sgt. Timm Browne, a police spokesman who attended the news conference, denied all such allegations, which also have been made by other laborers on the streets.

“We are not stopping people arbitrarily and asking for identification,” Browne said. “If they don’t have (identification), then we take them in and allow them to produce it. If they can’t, they are transported to the San Clemente Border Patrol.”

Perez said he and other city officials expected to come under heavy criticism for their policy. Latino groups have been particularly critical of him because of his own Mexican ancestry, he said.

But Perez challenged his critics to come up with a less-disruptive solution to the problems created by uncontrolled immigration.

“It is a very traumatic and delicate thing to go through,” he said “But we must do something.”