To Children at Youth Club, Alien Ban Is ‘Bad,’ ‘Unfair’ : Illegals: An official who administers the club says he doesn’t understand the motivation behind the Costa Mesa City Council action or how such a ban would be enforced.

Above the din of children slipping back and forth between Spanish and English on Friday afternoon at the Westside Boys and Girls Club, 11-year-old Marcos Sandoval is asked what he thinks of a proposal that could keep illegal aliens from using the center.

“What’s that?” he said.

Illegal aliens. People without their papeles --their legal papers.

“Oh, that’s bad, man,” the youth replied. “It’s not fair that somebody without their papeles couldn’t come here.”

This Boys and Girls Club serves a largely Latino population, many of them children of immigrants who are increasingly settling in pockets of Costa Mesa’s westside. Last year, the city gave the center $3,000--half of it from a federal community development block grant--to supplement its general budget.

But if the city goes through with a proposal to allocate funds only to groups that refuse to serve undocumented immigrants, organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club would be forced to give up the money or begin screening clients to determine who is and isn’t a legal resident.

And that, say directors of the Boys and Girls Club of the Harbor Area, is a task they don’t relish.

“I don’t fully understand myself what the real motivation is,” said Richard Power, director of the Harbor Area region that includes Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. “Are we going to have to require parents to fill out a card saying they are here legally? Would they have to present a birth certificate? And if they don’t, does that mean we cannot serve them?

“Better to have these kids in the club than on the street,” he added.

Many of the children who frequent the small westside complex on Hamilton Street gave the proposal a thumbs-down.

“I think it’s a bad policy because nobody is going to want to show up here,” said Jimmy Madrid, 16, who was chosen the club’s Youth of the Month during January. “And the parents are going to be afraid of sending their kids here. It’s a dumb rule. I was born here, but my parents were born in Mexico, and probably most of the parents of the kids who come here were born in Mexico.”

After school let out at about 3 p.m., dozens of children from surrounding schools poured into the club, a converted junior high school, to shoot pool or wait excitedly for the Friday afternoon movie to begin.

This week, the staff of the Hamilton Street Boys and Girls Club had rented “The Bear.”

Other days, students work with tutors at the club on homework assignments or computer training or arts and crafts.

“It keeps a lot of the kids out of trouble,” said Jaime Sierra, 14. “It kept me out of trouble. They could be in gangs, and there’s also a lot of druggies around here.

“I’ve been coming here for four years, and I know that most of the kids were born here, but some of them weren’t,” he said. “Their parents may be illegal, but they are not. I was born in Mexico, but I have my papers.”

The youths at the center, who are anywhere from 6 to 17, illustrate the difficulty that social service agencies would face in making distinctions between children who are here legally and those who aren’t. And then, the staff members say, there is the matter of children who perhaps were born here but who have siblings who are foreign-born. There could be cases where some of the siblings have been legalized by their parents while others have not been.

“What are you saying to children--that you can come here because you were born here, but your brother or sister cannot join the Boys Club because they are illegal aliens?” asked Carlos Holguin, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. “Neither has the culpability. They’ve simply been brought here. That penalty is really mean-spirited and flies in the face of fundamental fairness in this country.”

The Costa Mesa City Council passed an alien-funding ban last summer but suspended it pending a legal review by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This week, HUD ruled that the policy is legal, and council members say they will now consider reinstating it.

If it comes to pass, directors here and at other agencies say, it will be tough to enforce.

“Why should their legal status matter in whether or not they can come and play here,” said Agustin (Guty) Heredia, 18, a champion basketball player at Estancia High School who works part time at the center. “If anything, we should be helping them out, not keeping them out.”

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