Commentary : Police, Border Patrol Wrong Partners : Law: Calling in agents when migrants seek help from the law helps no side in the migrant problem.

A couple of weeks ago, two undocumented farm workers went to East County’s Ranchita sheriff’s substation to ask for help claiming unpaid wages from a local grower. The way they figured it, being cheated out of several months’ hard labor was too great a wrong for las autoridades (the authorities) not to set right.

Sheriff’s deputies on duty called in Border Patrol agents, ostensibly to interpret for them. The two farm workers soon found themselves on their way to San Ysidro in a Border Patrol van--dubbed perrera (dog-catcher’s wagon)--empty-handed and convinced that any contact with law enforcement invites deportation.

In the northern half of San Diego County, where sheriff’s deputies not only police the unincorporated areas but are under contract to cities with numerous day laborers, this conviction is widely shared by migrants.

The consequences of such mistrust can be dire for a population that is actually terribly victimized, despite a series of attempts to portray farm workers as perpetrators of serious crime.

For example, early this year, farm workers in Rainbow-area encampments endured several weeks of payday holdups by a pair of gun-toting Anglos. Only when a robbery victim was shot in the stomach without provocation was the Fallbrook sheriff’s substation called.

Asked what took them so long, the workers explained that el sheriff usually brought along la migra (the Border Patrol), making even the newly legalized among them apprehensive.

Sheriff’s deputies again professed that they team up with the Border Patrol simply to avail themselves of Border Patrol agents’ Spanish-language skills. Few sheriff’s deputies are sufficiently conversant in Spanish to qualify for the department’s bilingual bonus.

Clearly, it behooves the department to quickly better its ability to communicate directly with the substantial number of non-English speaking people working and living in North County. For sheriff’s deputies, a smattering of street Spanish, ineffective in the past, no longer does the trick, because Spanish is barely a second language for a new wave of migrants from southern Mexico and the highlands of Guatemala.

However, the community relations problem at hand goes beyond the Sheriff’s Department’s non-compliance with state bilingual services’ mandates for public agencies like those involved in law enforcement.

Given the leading role sheriff’s deputies played in recent alien roundups solicited by the city of Encinitas, it would seem that the department has opted to actively enforce immigration laws, instead of focusing on police work.

Inevitably, this partnership between the two agencies is self-defeating for the Sheriff’s Department because it burns much-needed bridges to immigrant communities. Police departments from Santa Ana to San Jose have recognized this, and decline to participate in immigration raids.

San Francisco police do not even inquire into immigration status or release information to the Border Patrol of an arrestee’s suspected illegal presence, unless the offense charged entails controlled substances. A narrower directive allowing release of such information in the case of any felony has been proposed in Los Angeles.

Ignoring the fact that effective law enforcement depends on a high degree of cooperation by the entire public served, sheriff’s deputies, with border patrol agents at their sides, descended on three Encinitas encampments one Sunday afternoon last month.

Using trespass as a pretext to detain and interrogate migrants about alien status, they set the stage for immigration dragnets of questionable legality.

The trespass arrests become all the more transparent when one takes into account that complaints wholly unrelated to secluded encampment living (ranging from drinking and urinating in public, to a perplexing “verbally harassing children”) were cited at every turn to justify participation by sheriff’s deputies. All too predictably, each one of the 29 arrested was summarily turned over for deportation.

Aside from the civil rights questions raised by the blatant piggybacking of immigration sweeps onto minor offenses, the joint operation is troubling because it greatly intensified undocumented migrants’ fear of sheriff deputies and fueled anger and resentment on the part of documented migrants with whom they share encampments.

Not surprisingly, an “I’m your amigo” message delivered last week by a sheriff’s deputy to an all-documented work force at Encinitas’ hiring hall was reported in the press as not sitting especially well with observers of the raids.

Another issue that looms large is law-enforcement priorities. The Sheriff’s Department has a wide latitude to set them in unincorporated areas and retains such discretion in cities contracting for its services. Was a big show of muscle that netted the deportation of 29 encampment dwellers--most of whom returned within two days--cost-effective? Probably not.

Contrary to most people’s understanding, undocumented migrants’ illegal presence in this country is normally not a crime, but a civil matter that carries a deportation penalty. All the more reason why the Sheriff’s Department shouldn’t launch police efforts aimed primarily at deporting undocumented workers by detaining them under the guise of enforcing trespass, loitering, littering and public drinking and urination laws.

If compassion for workers subjected to so much indignity while trying to feed far-away families is not motivation enough for rethinking stepped up cooperation between the Sheriff’s Department and the Border Patrol, pragmatic considerations certainly should be.