Safety checkpoints put illegal immigrants in line to lose cars, sometimes more
10:13 PM PDT on Wednesday, July 2, 2008

By JULISSA McKINNON and SARAH BURGE
The Press-Enterprise

Deymi Barrios, a 25-year-old stay-at-home mom and illegal immigrant, had her car towed away from a checkpoint in Romoland because she was driving without a license.

Wrestling car seats from her Ford Focus as her two young children cried, she said she understood why deputies impounded her car.

"I know that the law is the law," Barrios said in Spanish. "But because I don't have papers, I can't get a license."


Deymi Barrios, of San Jacinto, carries car seats as she walks with daughter Lucero, 4. She was returning from driving her children to school when she came upon the checkpoint. Her car was impounded because as an illegal immigrant, she lacks a driver’s license.

Daytime checkpoints are gaining popularity among police as a way to make roads safer by taking cars from unlicensed drivers. But immigrant advocates say many of those caught up in checkpoints are not people with records of driving dangerously, just illegal immigrants who, like Barrios, cannot get a license at all.

Barrios chose to drive her 5-year-old son to school anyway May 5 because she did not want him to wait outside for the bus while he sniffled with a cold.

Her car was one of 75 taken away on the spot in southwestern Riverside County as part of a safety checkpoint put on by the Sheriff's Department. Anyone who failed to produce a license was ushered off Highway 74 through a gantlet of orange cones, where tow trucks were queued up like taxis at an airport.

Barrios, who came here illegally from Mexico seven years ago, worried about her husband's reaction to the $1,000-plus cost of retrieving their car.

"We'll probably have to cut our telephone service," she said. "The only thing that could have made this worse is if immigration was here."

ICE Agents

At two recent sheriff's checkpoints in Canyon Lake, immigration agents were there. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 35 people suspected of immigration violations.

Melissa Jimenez, 20, a member of the Explorer program for aspiring deputies, volunteered to help with Spanish translations at a March 27 checkpoint on Railroad Canyon Road, where she saw ICE agents making arrests.

"Most were agricultural workers or landscapers on their way to work. ICE filled up the van and took them to immigration jail," Jimenez said. "It made me feel bad, really bad. But this is my career so I have to do it."

ICE Assistant Field Director Eric Saldana said agents were there for two hours and took nine people into custody. Police had cited them for driving without a valid license, Saldana said. Eight opted for voluntary deportation, and one requested a hearing before a judge.

At another checkpoint in December, agents arrested 26.

Saldana said agents got involved in the checkpoints as part of ICE's criminal-alien program, which focuses on identifying illegal immigrants in jail.

ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said she did not know how many recent traffic checkpoints outside the Inland area have been visited by ICE agents.

Collaborations on large-scale operations, such as checkpoints, are likely to become more common, Saldana said, because Congress has granted ICE more funding to look for "criminal aliens" in the population.

"We have to start from some place," he said. "The logical place to start looking is for people who are in police custody."

"What it is, basically, is outreach," Saldana said.

Sheriff's officials said they welcomed having ICE agents at the checkpoints to serve as Spanish interpreters, not to arrest illegal immigrants.

Capt. James McElvain, head of the Sheriff's Department's Perris Station -- which provides policing services to both Perris and Canyon Lake -- said the department doesn't specifically invite ICE to attend the checkpoints, but it and other government agencies are alerted beforehand. The agencies can include Cal Fire, the Border Patrol, March Air Reserve Base and police departments, he said. The news media is also notified, he added.

DUI Checkpoints

The presence of immigration agents is just the latest twist in the evolution of police checkpoints.

Sobriety checkpoints became more widespread after a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court decision resolved questions about their legality.

The federal government doles out special grants to help police fund nighttime DUI checkpoints. But in recent years, some law enforcement agencies say they have staged daytime checkpoints to target the maximum number of people driving without a valid license. Police say these drivers are more likely to cause a fatal crash.

Since California passed a law in 1995 authorizing police to impound the cars of those driving without a license, getting caught in a checkpoint means a fine and a 30-day impound, which costs upward of $1,400.

Vehicle impounds have become such an everyday hazard for illegal immigrants that some buy cheap cars and abandon them at the tow yard if they get impounded.

Since 2006, Perris has provided about $24,000 annually to cover overtime costs for about a half-dozen daytime police checkpoints a year. Canyon Lake began daytime checkpoints last year using funds from its California COPS policing grant.


Motorists wait in line at a recent daylight checkpoint. Deputies were asking each one to show a valid driver’s license and impounding the vehicles of those drivers unable to do so.

McElvain said Perris started the checkpoints in part because the city had more than double the usual number of traffic fatalities in 2005 -- 15 people were killed. The station did a traffic study, McElvain said, and found that about 70 percent of traffic collisions in Perris involved a person who was unlicensed.

Now, about every sixth driver who passes through their checkpoints is unlicensed, said Sgt. Scott Forbes said. Before, it was closer to every third.

Police do not track how many of the unlicensed drivers they cite are in the United States illegally. Based on demographics alone, McElvain said, it is inevitable that checkpoints will catch many illegal immigrants.

"We are situated in Southern California. There's a large population that are undocumented immigrants," McElvain said. "That doesn't change the fact that we have a responsibility to our greater public ... to make us as safe as possible."

Perris Mayor Daryl Busch said checkpoints do not discriminate.

"It doesn't matter what your color, creed, sex or religion is," he said. "If you don't have a license, the law says you're not supposed to be driving."

Stranded or Deported

Luz Gallegos of TODEC Legal Center in Perris said with daytime checkpoints, just driving to work can result in an illegal immigrant being stranded or deported.

Recently, a woman with her children came to the center in tears because her husband had been stopped at a police checkpoint where there were immigration agents, she said. He was deported.

It was heartbreaking, Gallegos said, to hear the man's son. "He was saying, 'My dad's not a criminal.' "

Whether the streets of Perris and Canyon Lake are safer as a result of the checkpoints is an open question.

If the police are seeing fewer unlicensed drivers at their checkpoints, Gallegos said, it may be because people are trying to avoid them. For instance, people will call the Spanish-language radio stations when they see a checkpoint, and the stations broadcast the location, she said

Gallegos said it is unlikely that impounding people's cars will keep them off the roads for long because there is no other convenient way to get around.

Jose Gonzalez, 40, of Perris, an illegal immigrant who has lived in the United States for two decades and whose daughter is a U.S. citizen, has had several vehicles impounded by police, including two at checkpoints. Twice, he has abandoned his impounded vehicles.

A month after his SUV was impounded at a checkpoint, Gonzalez, his daughter and a friend went toTown & Country tow yard in Perris to recover the vehicle. All told, this run-in with police cost about $1,700.

Gonzalez's friend, who has a driver's license, claimed the vehicle for him. But outside the gate, Gonzalez drove it away.


Found to be driving on a suspended license, Jim Zenns, of Romoland, walks home from the checkpoint after his vehicle is seized. He lugs the tools he was taking to work.

Perris-area towing companies that take part in the checkpoints describe a revolving-door situation with impounds.

"The same cars keep getting impounded. The same people keep coming through here," said Garrett Yarbrough, tow manager of Champion Towing, which is owned by Yarbrough's family. His father, Mark Yarbrough, is a Perris councilman.

One car Champion impounded and sold in October, after the owner failed to claim it, made its way back to the tow yard by January. In the meantime, it had been impounded for 30 days by another towing company.

Yarbrough said most of the cars his company tows from checkpoints are worth little and are abandoned. Champion either auctions them off or sells them for scrap.

"Most of the people around here who don't have licenses, they buy a car that's already registered," Yarbrough said. "And they get one that's cheap because they know it will be taken away eventually."

Yarbrough said the law does not require it, but Champion makes the buyers at its auctions show they have a driver's license. There is no way to prevent buyers from handing over the cars to unlicensed drivers, however.

At an auction last month, Yarbrough briefed the audience of would-be bidders on the rules. Among them: No buying back your own car.

Whatever portion of the bill the company cannot recoup through the car's sale, it sends out to collection.

Those who reclaim their cars after 30 days must pay $150 to the police department for a release and show a valid license or bring someone who has one. Then, the owner pays the towing company about $140 for the tow and $40 or more per day for storage.

Legislative Approach

If police checkpoints are about safety, state Sen. Gilbert Cedillo has another idea to reduce the numbers of unlicensed drivers on California roads: Issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Cedillo, who represents a Los Angeles-area district with a large immigrant population, has introduced legislation to license illegal immigrants since laws were changed in the early 1990s to bar them from obtaining licenses. Arturo Chavez, director of Cedillo's Los Angeles office, said the state could get millions of people paying fees who are now forking over money to tow companies.

"It's just a license to drive," Chavez said.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles, said she has heard of daytime checkpoints targeting unlicensed drivers in cities across Southern California, including Anaheim, Pomona, Alhambra and Escondido.

Salas is not convinced that the checkpoints are about safety. She said they are revenue generators and are a way for local law enforcement to go after illegal immigrants.

She said the checkpoints damage the relationship between police and immigrants, some of the most vulnerable people in a community. The immigrants become wary of police and less likely to report crimes, Salas said.

Hans Johnson, associate director of the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank that has researched border and immigration enforcement, said practices such as driver's license checkpoints are often the outcome of "frustration on the local level of a federal policy that does not adequately address what everyone agrees is a broken immigration system in the U.S."


Daniel Hernandez retrieves his belongings, and driver Chuck Smedeley closes the man’s vehicle for towing. It was seized at a checkpoint after Hernandez was found to be driving without a license.

But local efforts to enforce immigration law do not seem to affect the net number of immigrants in any community or the flows of people across the U.S.-Mexico border, he said.

Johnson said police involvement in immigration enforcement has a "chilling effect."

"On the other hand," he said, "many people are fine with that. There's a point of view, and it's a valid point of view, that to discourage illegal immigration, we should make the lives of illegal immigrants more difficult."

Reach Sarah Burge at 951-375-3736 or sburge@PE.com
Reach Julissa McKinnon at 951-375-3730 or jmckinnon@PE.com
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