Racial Case Prompts More INS Training

Following a raid at a Camarillo firm during which an agent reportedly made derogatory remarks to Latino and Jewish employees, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials said Thursday they will require more cultural sensitivity training for agents.

The announcement follows a federal internal investigation of the raid that occurred in February at Wilwood Engineering, in which the agent referred to two employees as “Pedro” and “Rabbi,” INS officials said.

The training seminars, which will be based on classroom courses already taught at the federal agency’s academy, will be mandatory for all 300 agents working at the four INS offices in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.

But Bill Wood, president of Wilwood, a factory that produces disc brakes, said the action isn’t enough.

“This is news to me,” Wood said Thursday afternoon. “What little information I’ve gotten so far is what they’ve told the press. They haven’t contacted us, they haven’t written to me. There has been no apology.”

Wood, who filed the complaint that launched the investigation, said he was also incensed that federal officials have refused to release a copy of their investigation. INS officials have also refused to identify the agent who made the remarks.

“These people are supposed to be public servants, but they sure don’t act like it,” Wood said.

Thomas Schiltgen, the INS district director in Los Angeles, said Thursday that the investigation found evidence that one agent who worked on the raid in Camarillo was unprofessional and discourteous toward Wilwood employees.

Schiltgen would only identify the agent as a man who works in the Los Angeles or Camarillo office. He said the agent faces disciplinary action, but he would not say what that action might be.

In addition to the unprofessional conduct, the INS investigation found systemic problems in procedures that agents use to identify people who might be in this country illegally and employed at a U.S. business, Schiltgen said.

During the Wilwood raid, 20 agents from the Los Angeles and Camarillo INS offices rounded up about 180 employees and herded them into a small room where their documents were checked, according to employees.

It was during that roundup that the agent made the remarks, employees said.

Ten company employees were arrested, seven of whom were deemed undocumented workers and returned to their native countries. The other three were allowed to return to work.

The raid at the company’s headquarters followed a routine check of hiring documents in January that revealed as many as 72 discrepancies, INS officials said.

Schiltgen acknowledged Thursday that a more thorough review of those hiring documents would have shown agents that one of the three employees they temporarily detained was, in fact, a documented worker.

That snafu was uncovered during the INS’s internal investigation, which included detailed interviews with the 20 federal agents working the raid and 25 Wilwood employees, federal officials said.

“There was concern in the preparatory work leading up to the operation and that we needed to, in at least one instance, do a more extensive records check,” Schiltgen said.

The wrongful detention means INS officials will review policies that guide agents on how to conduct checks of employment records, Schiltgen said.

Although they discussed it, neither the employee who was wrongfully detained nor any other Wilwood worker has filed a lawsuit over the raid.

But Wood, who said he never objected to the review of his employment records, believes the agents trampled the rights of his employees and that the agency has failed to make amends.

“The problem goes a little deeper than sensitivity training,” Wood said. “Something went grossly wrong here that day. They surrounded my building and came in here like storm troopers.”

The mandatory training that agents will undergo will be designed from lessons taught at the INS’s 16-week academy, which all agents go through before getting a badge, Schiltgen said.

“In response to this investigation, we think it’s a good time to have additional training--a refresher session on the issues. We think a wide majority of the officers do conduct themselves in a professional manner,” he said.

But, he added, “the way we address people has an affect on the professionalism” of the department.