Serving Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and surrounding communities
By John Earl
Editor
Outgoing Costa Mesa city councilmember Gary Monahan probably knows that Mayor Allan Mansoor's reelection bid is running on thin ice. That would explain his ongoing and inappropriate use of city council time to campaign for the Mayor's reelection by championing his signature campaign issue, a plan to use the Costa Mesa Police Department to enforce immigration laws.
The Mayor, an honorary member of the Minuteman Project-an armed vigilante hate group that openly espouses a racist and anti-Catholic ideology, whose leader, Jim Gilchrist, once hired Neo-Nazis on his staff and tinkers with the idea of armed insurrection, would have Costa Mesa police officers trained by the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and, theoretically, deport “illegal” immigrants suspected of “serious” crimes.
The Mayor says that Costa Mesa needs to help ICE because a lot of bad immigrants are “falling through the cracks” and ICE doesn't have the resources to handle them.
Last June, Monahan used the city council dais to fume that, “illegal” immigrant gang members, sex offenders and violent felons are coming to get our citizen children and aren't being deported. Monahan got this idea, in part, from a Los Angeles Times article, but the argument closely parallels vitriolic rhetoric from anti-immigrant radical Barbara Coe, who refers to Mexican immigrants as “savages” who come to American to kill its citizens.
Monahan presented more statistics at the October 17th city council meeting, this time from Sheriff Juan Corona. He reported that 85 percent (13,039 of 15,272) of the foreign nationals booked into the County Jail in 2005 were not interviewed by ICE agents and that most of those who were interviewed (2,235 of 3,000) had undocumented status.
He added that the approximately 55,000 illegal immigrants imprisoned throughout the United States had a total of 459,000 arrests, meaning an average of eight arrests for each prisoner. All this was proof, he said, that the Minuteman Mayor is looking only for felony repeat (immigrant) criminals and that about 80 percent of them are slipping through the cracks because “ICE does not have the amount of people to do it.”
Monahan forgot to point out, however, that, according to the Sheriff's report, 77 percent or 51,016 of all bookings were for crimes committed by American citizens, not illegal immigrants.
That fact prompted councilmember Katrina Foley to recall that former police chief John Hensley had said that not more than 6 individuals in the city would likely fall into any of the categories Monahan mentioned. “We still have a lot of criminals in our county who are not here undocumented,” she said, “we should work on trying to prevent those crimes as well.”
But Monahan unknowingly gave the Mayor's ICE plan a fatal blow when he noted that, per a recent agreement reached between the County and ICE, the Sheriff will have up to 24 jailers trained in ICE procedures who will interview every jailed foreign national to determine their legal status in the United States. On that point alone everyone should admit that the Mayor's ICE plan is a redundant waste of police resources and our tax dollars.
That's basically what Hensley told the city council last March. Under questioning by Foley, Hensley admitted that ICE training costs will be endless, not a one time $200,000 deal as promised by the Mayor. Due to normal officer rotation required by union contract, the city could end up paying over $200,000 each year for training alone. Changing job descriptions will require renegotiating of labor contracts and, according to a city staff report, initial costs could reach $1.5 million.
That's a lot of money just to identify a few illegal immigrants while taking police officers away from other duties that would actually protect Costa Mesa's residents from crime. Hensley would have preferred to use the money for new electronic scanning devices that would allow police to catch crime suspects and help prevent terrorism.
Most important, the city's police department is now short by 17 officers under the leadership of the Mayor and his council cohorts Monahan and Eric Bever. The Mayor has even opposed the Department's request for more funds to help prevent gang violence.
Instead, if the Mayor and co-candidate Wendy Leece, who sits parrot-like on the Mayor's political shoulder, have their way Costa Mesa police officers will be bogged down with extra paper work that should be done at the County Jail, imposed by yet another layer of government. That will increase booking time for suspects from one to four hours. That's valuable crime fighting time, wasted on border politics.
The Mayor absurdly calls the new Orange County/ICE agreement only a “good first step” and still insists on having his own Costa Mesa Border Patrol. But even the thought of that has already created fear in the local immigrant community-which Hensley and virtually every other police chief on record says will result in fewer calls to police and more unsolved, serious crime.
The Mayor's immigration program has also caused previously unimaginable social, political and financial conflict within this city of barely over 100,000 people, including immigrants.
It started when the Mayor decided to prematurely curtail a local activist's free speech time after being called a “racist pig.” Pandemonium broke out as police allegedly beat the activist outside of council chambers and dragged him into another building, (allegedly) causing multiple injuries. A costly lawsuit against the city, just what it doesn't need now, is likely.
In the following months, city council meetings became a mockery of good government as protesters and Minuteman members clashed inside and outside of the chambers. On April 10, over 1,500 immigrant rights protesters descended upon the Costa Mesa City Hall, now a world-wide symbol of bigotry thanks to the Mayor, to make it clear: “No justice, no peace.”
Small businesses were also caught in the conflict created by the Mayor's icy social agenda when labor leaders opposed to it threatened a city-wide boycott without even consulting the people whose interests they purport to represent-the city's immigrants themselves. Rightly, that boycott fizzled, but many immigrants, fearing deportation because of the mayor's plans, took their business outside of the city.
Even the Costa Mesa Chamber of Commerce, hardly a bastion of radical liberalism, opposed the Mayor's immigration reform efforts. But the current city council majority, which often brags about making the city business friendly, further divided the city when it turned a deaf ear to the concerns of its most affected business owners, many of whom were Latino.
What can Costa Mesa residents expect if Allan Mansoor is reelected to the city council and Wendy Leece joins him on the Dais? To answer that question, consider the larger agenda that the Mayor, Monahan and Bever have pushed in recent years. It started out with the Mayor's bigoted anti-gay remarks and closure of the city's human relations commission, followed by closure of the job center that served immigrants and will end, we hope, on Election Day, November 7.
The Minuteman Mayor's term has also been punctuated by attacks on the poor and those who help them, including the appointment of a known white supremacist to a redevelopment board and snide remarks about “cleaning the neighborhood” and Latino culture.
In this time of great environmental uncertainty, he has opposed efforts to make future development in the city comply with reasonable standards to protect the future quality of life of our children. And he has been unable to cooperate with the city's police department, whose members are supporting his opponents.
After accepting his honorary Minuteman membership last January before a crowd of 150 cheering anti-immigrant zealots, Mayor Allan Mansoor said that he had accepted a less “comprehensive” version of his own plan to ensure its passage; he originally proposed rounding up jay-walking immigrants too Then he agreed with a questioner that police should be allowed to stop any person on the street and ask for proof of legal residency.
Here's some good advice for votes on Election Day: Beware, you have been warned.
Nov. 7: Take a minute to oust Costa Mesa's Minuteman mayor.
Minuteman vigilante carrying a rifle poses with a banner supporting Costa Mesa mayor Allan Mansoor.
The Mayor absurdly calls the new Orange County/ICE agreement only a “good first step” and still insists on having his own Costa Mesa Border Patrol.
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