Election-Eve INS Raid Stirs Controversy : Politics: Charges fly after agents crack down on day laborers in Woodland Hills.

On the final day of her toughest reelection campaign, Los Angeles Councilwoman Joy Picus watched from the sidelines Monday as immigration agents sealed off an intersection in Woodland Hills and arrested 38 day laborers whose presence angers local residents and merchants.

Picus has been fielding constituent complaints about the laborers and her staff tipped The Times that the raid was coming, but she and federal immigration officials denied any connection between the raid and today’s election for Picus’ seat.

Challenger Laura Chick, however, called the arrests an obvious grab for votes in the heart of Picus’ largely Anglo West Valley district.

“It’s such manipulation, such phoniness,” said Chick, a former aide to Picus. “This is an issue that she’s never done anything about. Now, the day before the election, she’s participating in this thing and working up a photo opportunity.”

But Picus, who formerly sided with immigration activists to block city police officers from helping federal agents identify illegal migrants, maintained that she had no control over the timing of the raid by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“It flatters me you think I have this much control over the INS, which is a federal agency that’s not under my jurisdiction,” Picus said at the scene of the arrests at Ventura Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue, just north of the Ventura Freeway.

“I can’t imagine the INS has any interest in city elections.”

Immigration officials supported that disclaimer, saying the sweep of illegal immigrants had been planned according to their own--not Picus’--schedules.

“I don’t work that way,” said John Brechtel, assistant director of the INS regional office in Los Angeles.

Brechtel called the timing of the raid “a coincidence, and not done to influence the election.” He added that he lives in Orange County and only recently became aware that Picus was seeking reelection.

Picus--embroiled in an intensely personal race with her former chief field deputy--is facing her first runoff election in 16 years on the council and has come under increasing pressure to address the day-laborer issue.

During their campaign for the seat representing the 3rd Council District in the southwestern San Fernando Valley, both Picus and Chick have called for tighter controls on illegal immigration.

The Ventura-Fallbrook intersection has become a well-known gathering place for as many as 100 to 150 men seeking work each day, prompting several complaints a week to Picus’ office, said her chief field deputy, Karyn Palmer.

Residents and merchants have complained that the men urinate and defecate in public, get into drunken brawls, harass passersby and intimidate business patrons, Palmer said. Some of the men--unable to find day jobs--pass the time gambling, selling illegal drugs and bringing prostitutes into the brush beneath the freeway, she continued. Some sleep in camps in the hills above residential neighborhoods.

In the past, Picus has supported efforts to limit the Los Angeles Police Department’s cooperation with the INS. In 1990, city records show, she voted in favor of a proposal to toughen Special Order 40, a Police Department policy that prohibits officers from asking about immigration status or reporting suspected illegal residents to the INS.

But for the last nine months, Palmer said, Picus’ staff has been meeting with INS agents and community activists in an effort to curb the number of day laborers at Ventura and Fallbrook.

“It’s a very difficult balance because we want to be humane about it--people are really striving to stay alive and my heart goes out to them,” Palmer said.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “it’s really disruptive to a residential neighborhood and something needs to be done.”

Monday’s sweep began shortly before 9 a.m. as several unmarked cars braked suddenly to a halt in the middle of Fallbrook Avenue, quickly scattering dozens of day laborers who fled from the armed and uniformed agents piling out of the vehicles.

Some tried to scramble up the thickly landscaped slope of the freeway while others ran for the alleys behind nearby strip malls. Several dashed directly into the street--narrowly missing oncoming cars despite efforts by federal agents and the California Highway Patrol to temporarily block traffic.

“Idiots!” cried out one INS agent as he chased two men between passing cars.

Twenty agents fanned out through the neighborhood, methodically handcuffing captives and questioning them in fluent Spanish. One 23-year-old Mexican man whose hands were trembling and who appeared on the verge of tears insisted that he was in the country legally though he was unable to produce a green card or other proof.

“I’m sympathetic,” the agent told him, “but you don’t have your papers.”

About a dozen men who were able to produce the right documents were released as their friends were loaded onto a large bus bound for an INS detention facility.

Picus, dressed in a business suit, watched quietly from a nearby strip mall, then left to walk precincts. She said later she attended the raid because it took place in her district and she had never seen one firsthand.

“I was dealing with a serious problem in my district that my staff has devoted a lot of energy and effort to,” Picus said.

“I had never been present at such a thing,” she continued. “I wanted to see what they did, what happened. It was information gathering for me.”

Palmer, Picus’ deputy, alerted The Times to the raid without disclosing what would occur beforehand. She said later that her main motive for inviting a Times reporter and photographer to the event was the hope that publicity would deter people from hiring the laborers, and that the journalists’ presence would ensure the men’s safety as they were arrested.

“What we want to do is make that neighborhood habitable again,” Palmer said. “If we do it in secrecy so that nobody knows the INS is going to work in that area, then there’s no point to it.”

Word of the raid quickly spread through the area’s businesses, drawing praise despite some skepticism that it may have been politically inspired.

“I’m so glad that happened,” said Nitza Doron, vice president and manager of the local Bank of America branch. “We’ve been losing customers left, right and center.”

Doron, who said she has been calling and writing the INS for the last two years with no results, said she assumed that Monday’s arrests were prompted by the city elections.

“You don’t know, but how can you not connect it?” Doron said.

Marcia Brooks, a member of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization who has been working with the INS on the issue, said she doubted the federal agency would be influenced by city politicians.

“They’re too straight. They don’t give in to pressure,” Brooks said.

But another member of the homeowners’ group, past president Bob Gross, was skeptical.

“It’s quite obviously political for Joy to be taking such a personal interest in this INS raid--I will never believe anything other than that,” said Gross, a Chick supporter.

“We’ve had countless meetings with the councilwoman about this location being a problem before, but something only happens now.”