WESTSIDE : Protesters Disrupt Forum on Immigration Initiative

A campaign forum on the so-called “Save Our State” initiative at the Museum of Tolerance was briefly disrupted Tuesday night by members of several Los Angeles-area community groups who charged that the November ballot measure, which would eliminate most government services to illegal immigrants, is racist.

Taking the podium before the debate, Huntington Park pastor Rody Gorman demanded that former INS Regional Director Harold Ezell, who co-authored Proposition 187, renounce a recent statement by another leading proponent of the measure: “You are the posse, SOS is the rope.”

Panelist Ezell, who was not yet on the stage, did not respond.

As members of the Southern California Organizing Committee, United Neighborhoods Organization, Valley Organized in Community Efforts and East Valleys Organizations were leaving, Mariano Cisneros Jr., who said he is a UCLA law school student, stood. He said that the ballot measure, which calls for education and health care administrators to report suspected illegal immigrants to federal authorities, “is the Nazis all over again.”

Ezell said later that the demonstration “does them harm and us good.”