History Repeats, and Haunts, the Immigration Issue

It was around 4:30 a.m. when the phone rang, about an hour before sunrise. The overnight guard manning the Del Mar stable gate was on the line, telling Joe Harper there were headlights appearing in the darkness and vehicles gathering nearby. Harper sighed, got dressed, and hurried to the track. It was happening, just like United States Border Patrol officials had promised. The date was Friday, August 23, 1985. For more than a week, tensions had ebbed and flowed between officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service on one side and representatives of the racetrack and Thoroughbred trainers on the other. The INS had targeted Del Mar for harboring the kind of undocumented backstretch workforce prevalent at so many racing operations, and Harold Ezell, head of the INS western district, was playing hardball. Ezell was a right-wing nativist ideologue and son of an Assembly of God minister who made enough money as an executive with the Wienerschnitzel restaurant chain to become a hefty contributor to the successful presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan. For his cash, Ezell got to name his reward, which put him in a position to enact anti-immigrant policies from the moment he took the job in 1983. Ezell argued that he was not anti-immigrant, but "anti illegal immigration," a distinction that proved vapid after he made a series of blatantly prejudicial public statements directed primarily at the growing undocumented Latin American population being hired in large part to accommodate California's burgeoning agricultural industry. By the time Ezell set his sights on the racetrack, his Border Patrol roundups had struck fear into the heart of the West Coast immigrant community—documented or not—while Ezell had become a media celebrity leading raids on farms and factories and comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. There were days the Ezell raids on businesses would round up as many as 3,000 people. In one media event, he lined up a cohort of detainees along Interstate 5 for display, like a prize catch of deep sea fish. One of his officers, said to be in "grave danger," shot and wounded a 12-year-old near the Mexican border. The Del Mar raid lasted from just after dawn to around 7:45 a.m. There were more than 150 Border Patrol officers involved, some recruited from Arizona and Texas, penetrating the backstretch during training hours both on foot and by official vehicles. Bill Shoemaker, the Hall of Fame jockey, was aboard Santa Anita Handicap (G1) winner Lord At War about to work at 5:45 a.m. "I was... at the five-eighths pole and was planning on breaking him off at the half-mile pole," Shoemaker told the Los Angeles Times. "Luckily, I heard someone hollering at me that there were immigration cars on the track. I looked up and there was a car coming right at me. Another 10 seconds later and I would have been gone." The raid netted about 125 people, Harper recalled this week. "And one Irishman," Harper said. "I asked him how that happened. He told me he was walking a hot when an agent approached. He said, 'Top o' the morning, officer,' and the next thing he knew he was in handcuffs in the back of a van. They let him out the next day." They let a lot of the detainees out because—and it is ever thus—the raid was all for show. "When Ezell led the agents into the backstretch, the only thing in front of him was the TV and news cameras," Harper said. In this politically cynical age, it has become hard to tell the true believers from the craven opportunists. The raid and roundup of backstretch workers at Delta Downs earlier this week by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement smacks of the same grandstanding antics deployed by Ezell—a roughhouse disruption of lives and livelihoods in pursuit of a policy that values chaos over solutions, enforced by bullies punching down, picking on the people who rise in the cold and the dark each day to clean stalls, mix feed, wrap legs, hose ankles, walk hots, comb manes, curry flanks, wash tack, and rake shed rows. Our people. The Delta Downs detainees were caring for Quarter Horses in Louisiana. But anyone who thinks a Thoroughbred track in another state is not next on the ICE hit list is living in serious denial. Warning lights are flashing across the racing landscape. When the 1985 INS raids occurred, Harper had been on the job running Del Mar for eight years. He had established community and governmental relationships that at least gave the racetrack a chance at a reasonable compromise with INS concerns, and trainers, as independent employers, might have been given some breathing room to secure the accepted documentation for their employees. "We were meeting with INS lawyers, in hopes of getting some kind of temporary work permit program," Harper said. "After all, the backstretch workers were licensed by the State of California, for what that was worth. I thought we had a shot. But then..." But then a frustrated California Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association president Bobby Frankel stood up at a meeting with INS and Border Patrol officials at their Chula Vista headquarters, uttered a profanity, and left the room. Harper felt the temperature for compromise drop below zero. "That was it," Harper said. "I knew then we were going to get hit." Because the specter of an INS raid had been rumored for days, hundreds of grooms and hotwalkers already had fled their Del Mar jobs by that Friday morning, whether they were documented or not. By the time the raid had swept up another 125, stables were gutted. Trainers responded by withholding entries for the program of Aug. 24, figuring it was their only point of leverage. "Maybe with the state, but this was a federal action," Harper said. "They could care less whether we raced or not. One trainer, Art Lerille, demanded to know why I wasn't doing something about it. I said, 'Art, there's 150 of them. They have guns. And they represent the U.S. government. What am I supposed to do?'" Once Ezell had his media event, and workers began trickling back to their stables, horses were entered for the Sunday card of Aug. 25. The INS agreed to help trainers obtain temporary work permits for undocumented immigrants (referred to as "illegal aliens" in most press accounts), based on a program that acknowledged the paucity of a qualified, documented labor pool. "It was recommended by an INS attorney that we place a want ad seeking applicants to work with horses, experience not necessarily required," Harper said. "I knew it was pointless—I think we got two applications, and one was my son-in-law, who was allergic to hay—and the attorney knew it. But the effort would at least provide him with proof of how difficult it was to fill the jobs with everyday U.S. labor." Without a doubt, immigration policy has been among the most convoluted, politicized, and misunderstood arenas of American life since the founding of the republic. In the last century alone, the goalposts have been on wheels, shifting constantly because of cultural bias and political expediency. Draconian legislation like the Natural Origins Act of 1924 strangled immigration to new lows. Tens of thousands of German Jews were left to the mercy of Hitler's ovens because of the act's narrow restrictions. The floodgates then opened to European refugees after the war, while the Bracero program allowed for temporary labor to flow from Mexico to accommodate a booming U.S. agricultural industry that was, quite literally, feeding the world. In more recent years, as the noble glow of postwar immigration waned, there have been bipartisan attempts to create amnesty programs that would protect undocumented immigrants from deportation while they worked their way through the legal maze of green card acquisition or naturalization. Now, however, with an administration led by a president who loudly campaigned on closing the borders, an undocumented workforce becomes fair game. And the racetrack backstretch is a rich hunting ground. The Del Mar meet opens July 18. Harper and his Del Mar management team are bracing for the inevitable questions regarding workforce status, as well as the prospect of ICE interventions. "I know it's hard to believe that 40 years later, we're looking at the same things we faced in 1985," Harper said. "But it's not just in racing. It's everywhere."