Gallegly Joins Police, Border Patrol Raid

SIMI VALLEY — U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly got the chance Thursday to witness firsthand what he has ardently pushed for in Congress: the deportation of illegal immigrants.

The congressman joined about 25 law enforcement officers in an early-morning Simi Valley gang sweep, which also snared 20 men and women the U.S. Border Patrol identified as illegal immigrants.

The sweeps themselves are nothing new in Simi Valley, where residents and officials boast of the city’s relative lack of crime.

Since October 1995, the sweeps have resulted in about 100 arrests for outstanding warrants, parole violations and other offenses, Police Chief Randy Adams said. Although aimed primarily at suppressing gang activity, the sweeps sometimes give Immigration and Naturalization Service agents a chance to check for and deport illegal immigrants.

But the raids rarely include a VIP entourage, and typically not a gaggle of reporters and photographers. Thursday morning’s sweep was different. Gallegly, in Ventura County on business, said he had asked Adams to let him tag along and see the local police in action. And he invited the media along to document the event.

“The program has had such success, doing the gang sweeps, that I said the next time they had one scheduled to give me a call,” said an enthusiastic Gallegly, addressing the officers before they headed into the streets.

In all, Thursday’s action led to the arrest of one man suspected of battery, turned up probation violations by three suspected gang members and discovered a 17-year-old runaway from Hawaii.

Most of those taken into custody, though, were illegal immigrants, 17 of whom were sent directly to detention centers in Los Angeles County on their way back to the Mexican border, INS agents said.

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Starting just after 6 a.m., three caravans filed out of police headquarters’ parking lot, each with a list of homes to check. Gallegly and Councilman Bill Davis--accompanied by City Manager Mike Sedell and two members of Gallegly’s staff--followed the caravan carrying the Border Patrol agents. Their first stop was on 3rd Street.

Thin, predawn light crept over the neighborhood as the small crowd of police, politicians and press approached a plain, one-story home.

Police and Border Patrol agents went in first, while Gallegly and Davis waited at the door. Within minutes, the agents emerged with three Latino men, handcuffed together. The men, disoriented and barely dressed, squinted into the flare of camera flashes as they were led past Gallegly into a waiting van.

Agents picked up six men at the house. Gallegly said police had received complaints that the men had exposed themselves to neighbors.

“This was a result of neighbors’ concerns about the effect they were having on the neighborhood,” he said, adding that the men reportedly had dared neighbors to call immigration authorities on them.

“They said, ‘Give it your best shot,’ ” he said.

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Next up, a two-story house on Morley Street that Sgt. Greg Riegert said had been the source of 24 complaints, including molestation and child abuse. A reputed gang member who had previously been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon lived inside.

So did several families. Three stained beds, two of them folded out from old couches, were crammed into a garage filled with old machinery and junk. Simi Valley code-enforcement officers toured the building, taking notes. Gallegly grew somber viewing the squalor.

All together, 12 people--nine adults and three children--were herded into a white van at the curb. Several of them were crying.

As authorities rifled through the house, a distraught woman walked out onto the lawn.

“I don’t have the strength to fight you guys,” she said in Spanish. “I’ve been left without a home everywhere I go. I don’t know where I’m going to live.”

The woman, who would not give her name, is in the country legally, INS agents said later. But her son is not.

“I’m going to have to go back to Mexico with my son, because there is no room for us here,” she said, before breaking down in tears and returning to the house.

Gallegly watched the woman speak. After she went inside, he said that if she were in the country illegally, she should be deported.

Returning to some of his most often-repeated themes, the congressman said that illegal immigrants use up money for social services that could be spent on citizens and take jobs Americans need.

“In California, it’s beyond the crisis stage,” he said. “The people who have a legal right to be here are paying the price.”