Pomona Targets Border Patrol Tactics, Considers Filing Suit : Immigration: Council asks city attorney to push federal agency for stricter controls on sweeps, which some call arbitrary.

After the most recent sweep by the U.S. Border Patrol, the Pomona City Council is considering taking steps against the federal agency, including a possible lawsuit.

At a closed session Monday night, the Pomona City Council directed the city attorney to draft a resolution asking the Immigration and Naturalization Service to establish stricter guidelines for its Border Patrol arm.

The council also asked the city attorney to explore grounds for suing the INS if the guidelines do not halt what Pomona leaders call arbitrary and terrifying practices by the Border Patrol.

Pomona city leaders have a history of acrimony with the immigration agency over its periodic raids in the city, whose population is more than 50% Latino. The Border Patrol has said it is responding to complaints about illegal immigrants, but residents and some city leaders say border agents harass and indiscriminately question the city’s Latinos, including legal residents. Pomona is on the western fringe of the area covered by the Border Patrol’s Riverside office.

The latest sweep occurred May 10, when border agents arrested eight illegal immigrants in what supervising agent Ray Fuhrmann described as a routine operation.

Pomona Mayor Eddie Cortez and activist Fabian Nunez, however, charged that city residents were arbitrarily accosted by agents near Roosevelt Elementary School on North Huntington Avenue while dropping off and picking up their children.

“I’m just sick and tired of them doing this in Pomona” and near a school, Cortez said at a press conference the next day.

“What’s next? What is sacred in America?” he asked. “On Sundays they will hit the churches.”

Fuhrmann said no parents or children were harassed and that the agents were near the school solely to pursue illegal immigrants who had pulled into an alley in a pick-up truck.

Fuhrmann said the agents are supported by most Pomona residents. He gets numerous calls daily from Pomona residents trying to blow the whistle on illegal immigrants, he said.

Fuhrmann said he believes a small group of influential Pomona leaders are trying to intimidate the agency and make political points with townspeople.

But some activists see the raids as anti-Latino rather than anti-illegal immigrant.

“In practice, there are no other factors other than skin color they use to determine whether someone is undocumented,” said Nunez, who directs the Pomona-based Alliance for Immigrants Rights. “The community is literally terrorized by just the appearance of the INS.”

Congress gave INS agents the power to pursue anyone they believe might be an illegal immigrant, said Rebecca Chiao, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Center.

But court cases have recently held that agents need a firmer basis of suspicion than ethnicity to detain suspects or to invade their privacy. Cortez and Nunez said a recent federal appellate decision lends credibility to their concerns; the court ruled that the Border Patrol committed an “egregious constitutional violation” by stopping a car along the San Diego Freeway because its occupants looked Latino.

Cortez, who brought the issue before the council Monday night, said he hopes to get a hearing with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to present the city’s complaints and the forthcoming resolution.