Dayworker Ordinance Is Challenged : Agoura Hills: The ACLU and immigrant rights groups say forbidding laborers to solicit work in public places violates their constitutional rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union and immigrants rights groups are protesting an Agoura Hills ordinance forbidding day laborers to solicit work in public places, accusing the city of violating the workers’ constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly.

The groups also alleged that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies use the ordinance as a pretext to enforce immigration laws, which the protesters contend exceeds the deputies’ authority.

ACLU attorney Robin S. Toma demanded a repeal of the day laborer ordinance in a letter Monday to the Agoura Hills City Council on behalf of a coalition of five groups. The ACLU believes that the laborers “have a perfect right to ask for work on a public street as long as they are not violating other laws” of the city or state, he said.

“This ordinance is one of the most un-American things that someone could say,” said Linda Mitchell, spokeswoman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “Here we have people who are trying to make an honest day’s living through honest work. We are supposed to encourage people to do that.”

The groups also questioned the legality of the Friday arrests of 27 laborers as illegal aliens by Border Patrol agents summoned by sheriff’s deputies enforcing the Agoura Hills ordinance.

Toma said federal law prohibits local law enforcement agencies from asking questions about immigration status unless the issue arises in the process of enforcing a local law. They accused the Sheriff’s Department of using the Agoura Hills ordinance as an excuse to question workers about their immigration status.

Toma said he thinks that “the Sheriff’s Department is simply looking to rid the city of all Latino day laborers” and is using the ordinance as “just a pretext to get them” into the hands of immigration authorities.

“We believe the sheriffs are acting improperly by arresting people and just passing them over” to the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” Toma said, noting that only five people were cited by deputies for violating the Agoura Hills ordinance.

“They are trying to act as an arm of the INS. Why else are they citing only so few for violating the ordinance?”

Sheriff’s Lt. Jim Pierson denied that deputies did anything illegal Friday when they questioned laborers gathered at the site of a now-defunct city hiring center at Kanan and Agoura roads. A sheriff’s spokesman said that if deputies discover a person’s illegal immigration status in the course of a local investigation, they are not required to hold the alien for federal authorities.

Pierson said there were relatively few citations for violating the municipal work-solicitation ordinance because deputies were instructed to cite only those men who refused to leave voluntarily.

Pierson acknowledged requesting Border Patrol agents to come to the site in advance of Friday’s operation to clear the area of men who still gather there seeking work.

Mike Molloy, supervising agent of the Border Patrol office in Camarillo, confirmed that agents went to the hiring site Friday at the request of the Sheriff’s Department and that 27 men were taken into custody. But he declined to comment on the allegations that sheriff’s deputies overstepped their authority in questioning workers about their immigration status.

Meanwhile, Agoura Hills city officials expressed surprise that their ban on street corner solicitation has prompted such an outcry.

Members of the City Council--who have been grappling with citizen complaints about day laborers for nearly a year--said they believe that a phone referral service that began matching dayworkers with employers last week will be far better for the workers than standing around a street corner all day.

“I would think the phone system would be so much better for them,” City Councilwoman Vicky Leary said. “The summers can get awfully hot sitting around all day. By calling in, they don’t have to pay bus fare to come out and stand around.”

But Mitchell said she believes that the phone system is doomed to failure because most employers are reluctant to hire day laborers they cannot personally screen. She said similar phone banks in other cities have had only moderate success.

“The men aren’t finding work,” she said. “I know I would be hesitant to call a service and say, ‘Can you send someone to my house?’ There is something about the personal contact before you hire someone. And sometimes the construction foreman doesn’t know until that day or that morning that they need someone.”

Mitchell said the immigrants rights groups would prefer that the city continue to allow workers to use the previous hiring site to find potential jobs, and they are threatening legal action if the city does not overturn the ban on soliciting work.

But city officials are not inclined to do that.

The City Council sanctioned a temporary hiring site in August after a local restaurant owner complained that the large groups of workers standing around his restaurant were driving away customers, Leary said.

“The owner was upset because the workers were scaring off business and disrupting things,” she said. “They were whistling at people as they went by. We decided that we wanted to do something.”

For a while, the site was successful, but it soon became a “serious public nuisance,” Mayor Louise Rishoff said.

“They were drifting into shopping centers and catcalling the women. There was public urination and defecation in spite of the fact that we put public toilets there,” she said. “When a prospective employer drove up, there was a mad dash of workers, which caused many near-accidents.”

City officials eventually appropriated funds to set up a phone referral service that attempts to put together laborers and employers, and in March passed the ordinance making it a crime for workers to solicit jobs from streets, parking lots and other public places.

Enforcement of the law began when the phone referral system began operating, City Manager Dave Carmany said.

Joe D’Onofrio, director of community services for Agoura Hills, said the city is “committed to trying to make the phone system successful.”

Although he conceded that the service is off to a “slow start,” he said that one day it may be able to place far more workers than would ever be hired off a street corner.

“We can pull in jobs from the surrounding area, pull in jobs from Oxnard, the Valley and we can help place people in them. Normally, guys wouldn’t make the drive from out there to find laborers,” he said. “If we just wanted to remove people from the streets, we wouldn’t be spending $10,000 to try to help people find work.”