Activist: I’m receiving threats over my initiative to ban undocumented immigrant students from Yucaipa-Calimesa schools

By Beau Yarbrough, The Sun
It’s been an eventful few days for Joseph Turner since he unveiled a proposed ballot initiative that would see the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District ban undocumented immigrants from attending public school.
In an email Friday, Turner wrote that, as he had expected, he has been getting his fill of hate slung at him from those appalled at his proposal, including threats of violence and doxing — the malicious publishing of someone’s private and identifying information on the internet. He also has endured racist comments about his Asian girlfriend and homophobic slurs hurled his way.
Thursday night, though, he got a much warmer welcome in Mentone.
“You can’t put America first if you put American children second,” Turner told the roughly 200 attendees at the Redlands Tea Party Patriots’ April meeting at Mill Creek Cattle Co.
“It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar spent on educating an illegal immigrant child is a dollar not spent on educating American children,” he said.
In an email Friday, Turner said the response at the meeting was very positive, with a lot of support expressed by the attendees.
“About a dozen individuals at that meeting offered to help gather signatures,” Turner wrote in his email. He said he plans on presenting similar initiatives in the next two weeks at two school districts in southwest Riverside County and San Diego County — Lake Elsinore and possibly Escondido — after receiving inquiries from local residents asking him for his support.
A ‘NATIONALIST’ NOT A ‘CONSERVATIVE’

Earlier this week, Turner, 39, who resides in Torrance but is a former resident of San Bernardino and Redlands, announced his plan to promote a ballot measure that, if passed, would intentionally conflict with Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the denial of free public education to students based on their immigration status.
Turner, who describes himself as a “nationalist” rather than a “conservative,” founded the nonprofit Save Our State in 2004. The anti-illegal immigration group was accused of racism and monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Today, he has founded a new nonprofit, American Children First.
“We believe that American children are having their birthright stolen from them by illegal aliens and open border globalists hell-bent on destroying this great nation with their liberal policies,” a mission statement on the group’s Facebook page reads. “If you believe in American exceptionalism and the preservation of Western Civilization, join us!”


Turner filed his petition with the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters on April 3. He will need about 3,200 signatures (10 percent of the registered voters in the school district) to get his measure on the ballot. He chose Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified because of the relatively small number of voters in the district and its right slant: Nearly 60 percent of voters in Yucaipa voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
“We’re a nationalist organization and we mean business,” Turner told the crowd.
In the 2015-16 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, 9.4 percent of Yucaipa-Calimesa students were classified as “English Language Learners,” according to the California Department of Education. (Neither the district nor the state release statistics on how many students are undocumented immigrants or have parents who are.) That’s about half the rate of English Language Learners in San Bernardino County, which was 18.9 percent in 2015-16, and just more than a third of the state average, which was 22.1 percent the same year.
If approved by the voters in a special election or in a 2018 regular election, the initiative also would charge tuition to children who are legal citizens but whose parents are undocumented immigrants.
PLYLER V. DOE

Turner has said his hope is to inspire similar laws around the country and ultimately result in a challenge to Plyler v. Doe. His proposed ballot initiative echoes the 1975 Texas law at the heart of that case.
That law allowed Texas school districts to refuse to provide education to children who weren’t legal U.S. residents and allowed the state to withhold funds that would be spent on doing so. In 1977, the Tyler Independent School District began charging annual tuition of $1,000 to educate students without legal documentation. The U.S. District Court for Texas’ Eastern District, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, finally, the U.S. Supreme Court all agreed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution’s “equal protection” guarantee meant that all U.S. laws must be applied to all people in the same way, including children in the country without legal documentation.
This is not Turner’s first go-round with the ballot: He previously made unsuccessful bids for the San Bernardino school board in 2006 and for San Bernardino City Clerk in 2007. In 2006, Turner proposed a San Bernardino ballot measure to ban city-funded day laborer centers and require all city business to be conducted in English only. He also proposed penalizing landlords for renting to illegal immigrants.
“I jumped back into the fight after Trump was elected,” he said Thursday night. “I got reinvigorated.”
CRITICISM

Before the first signature has been gathered, Turner’s proposed ballot initiative has drawn criticism.
“Our mission is to provide an education for all members of our community,” Sharon Bannister, clerk of Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified’s Board of Education, said in a written statement released Tuesday. “Yucaipa-Calimesa JUSD welcomes everyone to be a lifelong learner.”
“This certainly does not seem like it would be constitutional,” said Sylvia Torres-Guillen, statewide director of education equity for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, on Tuesday. “Hopefully, the effect this will have is it will empower others in standing up against this kind of bias and discrimination and hatred, and certainly I would hope that school districts recognize their affirmative obligation to protect students and make sure they’re in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.”
But Turner says that voices of support will keep him going.
“Overall, the response has been very positive from the people I need to reach to be successful,” he said.

Article: http://www.sbsun.com/government-and-...limesa-schools