Immigration raids anger advocate
Canal district leader says enforcement violates civil rights

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

A community advocate in San Rafael voiced outrage Tuesday over the handling of federal immigration raids this month in which agents arrested dozens of people, in some cases arriving at homes before dawn and identifying themselves as police.

"This is a huge civil rights issue," said Tom Wilson, executive director of the Canal Alliance, who called a press conference Tuesday evening in the city's largely immigrant Canal district where many of the raids were carried out.

"This is a story of federal officers coming into people's homes without a search warrant, taking people into custody without an arrest warrant," Wilson said. "They use intimidation."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they are executing warrants for the arrest of immigrants who have committed crimes and illegal immigrants who have ignored final deportation orders.

Tim Aitken, deputy director of immigration's detention and removal office in San Francisco, said that when agents -- in the course of serving deportation warrants -- encounter other people who they suspect are illegal immigrants, they arrest them as well. An immigration agency spokeswoman could not provide Marin County arrest numbers. But a staff member in the office of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, said 65 Marin County residents have been arrested this month, and five of them had outstanding deportation warrants.

San Rafael Mayor Al Boro has called on California's U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats, to push the immigration agency to change the way it enforces the law, saying his city's children are the ones hurt most by the arrests.

"It is not the role of any government to instill fear in the hearts and minds of children, yet we have children who are fearful of leaving their parents; children that sleep with their backpacks so they have their belongings in one place in case their parents get arrested," Boro wrote the senators in a letter calling for immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... ss.bayarea