Costa Mesa Policy Just Looks a Bit Suspicious

You’re in the country illegally, and you commit a serious crime. The police department wants to send you back where you came from.

Other than the criminal, who would object to that?

At first blush, not me. The fewer violent felons in town, the better, I always say.

So I ask Humberto Caspa over coffee late Friday afternoon, what’s wrong with the policy Costa Mesa has adopted that would give some police additional training in immigration law enforcement, in the hopes of rooting out the bad guys? The council majority swears, I say, that the policy will target only the most serious criminals.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Caspa says, although he quickly goes on to say that there’s quite a bit wrong with it.

What he means is that nobody wants dangerous criminals in their midst, but he’s convinced the new policy is racist and merely the latest City Hall move designed to make Latinos feel unwelcome in Costa Mesa.

And therein lies the problem that, for whatever reasons, the city of 108,000 has decided to deliver unto itself. That is, in opting to become the first city in America to tack on immigration-law training, it raises the question of why it wants to incite the near-certain civic warfare.

The council majority sighs and says it’s all about keeping people safe -- legal residents and nonlegal residents alike. The majority insists it would be following proposed county guidelines and targeting undocumented residents involved in gang activity or other major crimes. “There will be no sweeps for enforcement for just immigration laws,” Mayor Allan Mansoor said last month. “I really want to stress that point. In other words, there must be another crime involved first.”

Not everyone is buying it, and skeptics aren’t limited to Latino residents fraught with real or imagined fears of overzealous cops checking their immigration status on minor infractions or making bureaucratic mistakes that lead to deportation. At last month’s council meeting at which the policy passed 3 to 2, some white residents also decried the city’s lone wolf efforts.

“Kill this proposal,” one man said. “Kill it now. We’re so much better than this.”

For years, Costa Mesa has been one of Orange County’s flashpoints on the immigration front. Its Latino population is approaching one-third, and various local issues have divided residents along the well-traveled fault lines. Illegal immigration is a visceral social fight between those who deplore the lawbreaker and those who see it as an outgrowth of social conditions and not worth fighting.

And always lurking in the debate are either spoken or unspoken issues of race.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but surely the council majority knew this would reignite the fuse. I’m doing some head scratching on the merits of a smallish city taking on additional police duties, not to mention wondering how deportation figures into an equation in which serious criminal activity presumably would send the bad guy away to prison, anyway.

In dissenting last month, council members Katrina Foley and Linda W. Dixon raised various issues too numerous to fully explore in this space, but the generic questions persist:

Why now? Of all the cities in America, why Costa Mesa?

On paper, deporting criminals is something everyone should applaud. The simple fact that everyone is not -- with complaints from white and Latino residents alike -- should tell the council majority that it has a credibility gap.

I asked Caspa, a part-time college professor and former newspaper columnist, how the policy specifically would harm law-abiding immigrants, legal or not. Other than general concerns about background checks for routine police matters, he acknowledges he can’t frame an exact scenario from the language of the policy itself.

But, he says, he knows in his bones that the policy is malevolent.

“The issue is racial,” he says, “and they want to kick us out.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.