Police Urged to Review Mexican-ID Rule

Dozens of anti-immigration protesters at Tuesday’s Anaheim City Council meeting demanded that police reconsider a decision to accept Mexican consular cards as identification.

Police chiefs in Orange County agreed last month to accept the cards as a form of identification. Since then, San Francisco County supervisors have started considering a similar policy.

Half a dozen Latino activists also attended Tuesday’s meeting, mostly to monitor comments by the Sherman Oaks-based American Patrol anti-immigration organization and the California Coalition for Immigration Reform.

Despite Tuesday’s protest and a “Defense of the Homeland” rally planned outside Anaheim City Hall on Saturday, police said they are standing firmly behind the joint decision by Orange County law enforcement to accept the cards.

“We have no plans to change our position,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Mike Hidalgo said. “We have already done in-house training about the card itself and showed our patrol officers the cards, so they know what it looks like when they run into it in the field. . . . It is another piece of identification. It doesn’t change the way we work.”