Residents of a Riverside, Calif. suburb came out en masse to block the arrival of immigrant detainees to their town.
On Tuesday, three buses carrying 140 illegal immigrants were unable to drive to the border patrol processing station in Murrieta, Calif., since a crowd of 150 outraged locals stood on the access road leading to the border patrol facility.
“Go home — we don’t want you here,” shouted angry residents, some waving American flags and holding signs that read “Return to sender” and “Bus illegal children to the White House.”
“We have enough issues here: we have our own veterans, we have homeless mothers, we have a lot of people living on the streets of L.A. We need to take care of these people first,” one protester told the local CBS affiliate.
Murrieta police deployed 26 of their 86 officers to the scene but after a half hour, Border Patrol officials decided to turn the buses around and reroute them to the Border Patrol station in nearby San Ysidro.
The afternoon crowd was “mostly peaceful,” Murrieta Chief of Police Sean Hadden told the Daily News.
But since Tuesday’s demonstration, “the general makeup of the protesters has changed,” according to the police, from locals who are anti-immigration to a larger group of 300 protesters, half of whom support immigration.
“Many of these protesters are from outside the local area,” Hadden added.
The town of Murrieta, with more than 100,000 residents, was outraged at federal plans to distribute detainees from overcrowded facilities in Texas, unable to deal with the influx of Central American migrant workers and unaccompanied minors crossing the border.
The 140 immigrants seeking to enter Murrieta had flown on a U.S. government charter flight from Texas to San Diego on Tuesday morning and were bused to Murrieta, an hour north of San Diego, early in the afternoon.
Mayor Alan Long had advised locals of the immigrant transfer at a news conference Monday, urging them to contact their federal representatives in protest.
“Right now the best you can do is contact the federal officials that make these decisions and ask for it to be changed,” he said, adding the town’s strong objection to the immigrant transfer citing the “significant impact to our resources.”
“Clearly this is a failure to enforce federal law and (the federal government) is spreading the cost and needed resources to handle this back on the backs of the local communities.”
Long warned that a new wave of detainees would likely arrive at the Murrieta border patrol processing center every 72 hours for several weeks. After processing, they would be released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who would seek to place them with family and friends living in the U.S., according to Long.
Murrieta had twice avoided receiving immigrant transfers. Two prior plans to move a group of 500 immigrants and then a group of 300 immigrants to the California town were canceled
Town officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The mayor of Murrieta will preside over a town hall meeting Wednesday night to answer constituent concerns on the issue.
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