Mayor of Orange Refuses to Halt Arrests of Illegals

The mayor of Orange again Friday refused requests from immigrants’ rights groups to halt arrests of undocumented workers.

The requests, presented at a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force, came from, among others, members of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, the Orange County Coalition for Immigration Rights and Hermandad Mexicana of Orange County, the Mexican brotherhood.

Over the past six weeks, police in Orange have arrested more than 200 immigrants on suspicion of misdemeanors--mostly men waiting for day work in the La Modena section of the city--and turned them over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Mayor Jess F. Perez, the city’s first Latino mayor, said after the meeting that it “does hurt to hear fellow (Latinos) shooting from the hip,” criticizing the policy. “Without all the facts,” he said, “they are perpetuating the idea that we are bigots.”

Perez said he understood the plight of the undocumented worker. Sixty years ago, he said, his own mother sneaked into Brownsville, Tex., as an illegal alien. The Latinos arrested in his city, he said, were his “own flesh and blood.”

After two hours of what Perez described as a “volatile” meeting, little had changed. The Orange County Human Relations Commission and activists for immigrants’ rights continued to insist on a moratorium on police actions, and the mayor and Councilman Fred Barrera, with the support of local businessmen, maintained their support for the policy.

Acting Police Chief Dean Richards said other police departments reported undocumented workers to the INS “sort of under the table, but as far as I know, we are the only ones to go public with it.”

According to statistics compiled by the Orange Police Department, the incidence of crime classified as murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary or theft, had been rising steadily in the La Modena area, from 45 incidents in November to 98 in February, when the police roundups began. The number of crime reports dropped to 56 in March, police said.

While most of the jobless in the streets of El Modena are honest and hard-working, Perez said, their overall presence had become troublesome.

“We are trying to discourage these men from becoming a nuisance by their sheer numbers,” he said. “In the absence of federal laws to help us, we are trying to do what we can.”

Police Lt. Ed Tunstall said that the city’s action is “unique in that we are targeting day laborers, but it is no different than what the Palm Springs police (force) does with college students during spring break.” But Robin Blackwell, coordinator for the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said the arrests have caused Latino residents to fear police. The result, she said, is not that crimes decrease, but that more crimes go unreported.

Nativo V. Lopez, the director of Hermandad Mexicana of Orange County, called the roundup policy “outright racist” and said it “boils down to police stopping people simply because they are brown.”