Consul Protests INS Raids Outside Office : Oxnard: The department says it has honored an agreement with Mexican officials to keep agents out of sight, but a nearby transportation center is a problem.

Mexican officials said Thursday they plan to lodge a formal protest through their embassy in Washington if the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service continues to arrest Mexican citizens outside their consulate at Oxnard’s main bus station.

INS officials responded that the consulate’s location next to a freight train yard at the Oxnard Transportation Center, 201 E. 4th St., makes it difficult for immigration agents to carry out their duties out of sight of consular offices.

Zoila Arroyo de Rodriguez, Mexico’s consul in Oxnard, complained that after staying away 10 months, the INS conducted two sweeps this week in parking lots outside the transportation center.

She maintained that the sweeps violated the spirit of a verbal agreement with the INS in January. But INS officials said they have kept their word and refrained from arresting people at the main entrance to the transportation building.

Since the agreement Jan. 10, Rodriguez said, agents had stayed out of sight until 10 a.m. Sunday. At that time, she said, she looked out the window of her office and saw an INS truck parked in the transportation building’s parking lot and saw immigration agents chasing people along the nearby railroad tracks.

INS agents returned at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, she said.

“Whether at the door or just outside, that’s a small detail,” she said. “How am I supposed to conduct my business if the people who come to visit me are being hauled away?”

But INS officials said they never told Rodriguez that they would stop checking the bus station and the freight yard. Such checks are an integral part of their duties nationwide, an INS spokesman said.

“Illegal aliens tend to use buses and freight trains to move around. . . .,” Alan Dwelley, assistant chief patrol agent, said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. Dwelley’s Livermore patrol section includes Ventura County.

“We’ve bent over backward to accommodate the Mexican consulate and honor our agreement, but we can’t totally shut down our operations in the bus station and the freight yard,” Dwelley said.

The INS might not have conducted sweeps near the transportation center since January, but it has not forfeited its right to do so, he said.

Rodriguez acknowledged that the INS has a right to interrogate suspects near the bus station--if it can distinguish them from people visiting the consular offices and if the questioning does not interfere with consular business.

At peak times, the line into the second-floor consular offices winds down a flight of stairs and out the front door of the transportation center.

“While the INS has every right to arrest persons, we don’t think it is correct to conduct these arrests in the proximity of our consulate,” said Jose Angel Pescador, general consul of Mexico in Los Angeles. Pescador oversees the Oxnard offices.

“If the situation repeats itself,” Pescador said, “we will lodge a formal protest before the U.S. government through our embassy in Washington, D.C.”

But to show its good intentions, Pescador said, the Mexican government will begin searching for new offices away from the transportation building.

Mexican officials are not the only ones complaining about the INS raids. Ticket agents at the bus station have also protested.

“When the Border Patrol drives by, everybody scatters and it’s hurting business,” said Jack E. McCory, the center’s Greyhound Lines agent. “They started coming when the Mexican consulate moved in here three years ago. They make random sweeps for no reason in particular, and my customers are being harassed.”

Earlier this week, McCory said, he witnessed an INS sweep in which four suspects were arrested. “They just pulled up in the driveway . . . and had a field day,” he said of the agents.

Rosa Gascoigne, Aztec Travel Service representative, said the raids at the bus station have hurt business and discriminate against Latinos.

“They are supposed to be the Border Patrol, and this is not the border,” she said. “If they had received a complaint or had some other reason to be here, that would be an entirely different situation.”

But Dwelley denied that the INS targets people because of their physical appearance.

The INS selects suspects for interrogation “based on the way they react to the presence of the officer,” he said. “Some people start acting very nervous. That’s usually an indication that they may be illegal aliens.

“I feel we have been very lenient in agreeing to stay away from the consulate itself,” Dwelley said. “I’m not sure what else we can do beyond that.”