Plaza Church Serves as Haven for Illegals Trapped by Amnesty Law

Poor immigrants have always gathered at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church at Olvera Street. But recently, particularly in the last month since the deadline passed to apply for amnesty, the small groups have become crowds of immigrant homeless.

These are the people the new immigration law was written to keep out. But thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants have continued to come anyway. And now, the priests say, they are beginning to suffer.

Every night for the last few months, Father Mike Kennedy said, a hundred or more immigrants have been sleeping on the wooden pews of the church they know as “La Placita,” the “Little Plaza.” Some are unable to find work, though they say jobs abound. Others take jobs illegally, only to have their employers fire them without paying them a cent.

“The people we’re getting now are much hungrier, much more desperate and much poorer than even last year,” Kennedy said. “These people have been abused. . . . These people don’t even feel like persons, but like a sub-class of persons.”

Kennedy, who works with immigrants who come through the church’s sanctuary program, said the problems increased sharply after May 4, when the deadline closed for immigrants to apply for amnesty. On June 1, a grace period ended for most employers to educate themselves about the new law, which penalizes them for hiring illegal aliens.

To illustrate the impact the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is having on the newly arrived illegal immigrants, priests and parishioners bedded down for the night alongside nearly 100 young immigrant men in the church.

“We commit ourselves tonight . . . to sleep on the same pews with the undocumented to feel what it is like to be homeless, to continue to help them with food and shelter, (and) continue to ask others to help find jobs for them,” one of the priests told a press conference before a Mass for the immigrants and parishioners.

They were surrounded by young immigrants carrying placards reading, “We are human beings too!” and “Papers don’t work, we do!”

Asked whether the church was encouraging employers to break the law by employing illegals, Father Luis Olivares, pastor of La Placita, said:

“We would not only hire people if they don’t have documents, but encourage others to do the same. (The law) is a violation of the simple human right to work.”

Many of the parishioners who joined the sleep-in are themselves immigrants, legal residents who have donated food and clothing to those a few steps behind them on the economic ladder. One low-income woman donated $1,000 to help the newcomers, Kennedy said, adding that many of the jobs the church has helped secure for the immigrants come from other parishioners who need work done around their own homes.

The church has long given sanctuary to Central American immigrants fleeing violence. Last December, the congregation voted to also give illegal immigrants sanctuary from immigration agents. Last summer, about 50 undocumented immigrants were sleeping in the church, Kennedy said. Now, he said, the church sometimes fills up completely and the homeless spill out into the cement patio.

One woman who works as a domestic said she had worked for four weeks when she was dismissed by her employer, who threatened to call immigration officials if she complained. A man worked all week in a construction job, only to be paid $3 instead of the $5 an hour he had been promised.

“I cut my finger working in a restaurant,” said 16-year-old Benito Riveras of Mexico, showing a reporter a still-fresh gash on a knuckle. “And as soon as I asked to see a doctor, they fired me. Without pay.”

Priests and other workers at the church are holding regular meetings to explain job rights to the newcomers and are currently drafting model job contracts that immigrants are urged to get employers to sign before they start working. Church workers will begin accompanying immigrants to their employers to demand back wages.

Simon Reyes, assistant chief of the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, the office that prosecutes employers who violate laws pertaining to wages and other workers’ issues, said Tuesday that his office has no way of measuring whether more illegal immigrants are being mistreated. State laws protect illegal and legal workers. Complainants are not required to say whether they are here legally.

Dr. Victor Clarke, an anthropologist who runs the Binational Center of Human Rights in Tijuana and attended the press conference, has denounced extortion of Mexican and Central American immigrants by municipal and state police in Tijuana.

“We plan to try to take this issue. . . to the United Nations,” he said Tuesday. “Immigrants crossing the border have always suffered human-rights abuses. But now they (the abuses) appear to be growing graver.”

He said weekly surveys conducted by his office indicate that 65% of immigrants living on the streets are robbed by Mexican police. The average amount taken, he said, was $64 from Mexican citizens and $171 from Central Americans, who carry more cash with them. Police have denied such claims.