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Border cops effort fails
Initiative won't be on state primary ballot
Mason Stockstill, Staff Writer
San Bernardino County Sun

An initiative to establish a statewide immigration police force failed to get enough signatures to make it onto the June ballot, but backers are still trying for the November election.
The California Border Police Initiative, spearheaded by Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Murrieta, would create an agency of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 officers charged with arresting illegal immigrants for deportation by the federal government.

Despite the number of regular citizens who volunteered to gather signatures for the initiative, it fell short of the nearly 600,000 needed to qualify for the primary election. On Jan. 3, Haynes resubmitted the proposal to the Attorney General's Office for the November election.

Haynes and his campaign consultants did not return repeated calls seeking comment. In a previous interview, the assemblyman said the police force is needed to "do what the federal government's not doing."

"They would be throughout the state," he said. "There would be interior enforcement, which the federal government doesn't do. There would be employer enforcement, which the federal government doesn't do."

He also estimated the state would save billions of dollars annually by not providing government services such as health care and education to illegal immigrants.

Although Haynes was confident enough signatures will be gathered to get the initiative on the ballot, opponents said its failure to qualify last year is a sign that there is not a wide level of support for the proposal.

Establishing such a police force only appeals to a limited number of Californians who hold extreme views about immigration and Latinos in general, said Armando Navarro of the Riverside-based National Alliance for Human Rights.

"What base they do have is a small population that they pander to because of their apprehension, the fear that exists toward the Latino community, which is clearly becoming a majority population," Navarro said.

Navarro said his organization has received what he called "hate mail" from supporters of proposals like the border police or the volunteer Minuteman patrols, using derogatory terms to describe Latinos and referring to illegal immigration as "an invasion."

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the illegal-immigrant population in the United States to be about 11 million, with more than 6 million of them coming from Mexico.

Haynes came up with the idea for the agency last year, after learning that federal law allows local or state police officers to enforce immigration law if they've been trained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Under the same law, the sheriff's departments in San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties have begun training with ICE to have their deputies check the immigration status of suspects being held in county jails.

Most law-enforcement agencies in California have policies preventing officers from inquiring about anyone's immigration status because officials believe that if immigrants feared deportation, they would never contact authorities and crime would go unreported.

The initiative's campaign committee raised more than $250,000 in the first nine months of 2005, according to the Secretary of State's Office. Most of the money was given in $5,000 or $10,000 increments from other campaign committees, such as Dennis Mountjoy for Assembly 2004 and Friends of Bill Morrow.

Mountjoy, a Republican assemblyman from Monrovia whose 59th District includes Apple Valley, Hesperia, Lake Arrowhead, Highland and north San Bernardino, and Morrow, a state senator from Oceanside, have endorsed the measure.