ON THE TOWN:The government that we deserve?

A few days ago, Marcelino Tzir Tzul was riding his bicycle on the wrong side of a Costa Mesa street.

Unable to produce any identification, Tzul was taken to the Costa Mesa city jail where a federal agent determined he was here illegally. Before you can say “Don’t I get one phone call?” Tzul was shipped off to Lancaster in preparation for possible deportation.

(By the way, shipping illegal immigrants north to Lancaster only to send them back south for deportation seems very inefficient and a tremendous waste of manpower and natural resources.)

The issue is not that Tzul was deported. The guy was here illegally and he broke the law by doing so. I won’t even get into all of the hype over Tzul and how the media is portraying him as some sort of saint. The guy is here illegally and should be kicked out.

Every candidate running for City Council last year wanted less of an illegal immigrant presence in the city — that was not the problem. The problem was how to go about achieving the goal.

During the campaign, the Costa Mesa Latino community was concerned that the city would conduct sweeps or detain people for minor crimes such as Tzul’s.

The police department was vocal about the dangers of an aggressive program that would erode the gains they had made in communicating with the Latino population.

Specifically, the police wondered aloud whether an illegal resident would report a crime over fear that they, the witness, would be exposed and deported.

Well, unless the laws have changed, I don’t think anyone reading this would classify riding a bike on the wrong side of the street as a serious offense.

What all Costa Mesa residents — even those who voted for Mayor Allan Mansoor — should be concerned about is the mayor’s apparent lack of concern over the effect of the arrest on the city’s Latino community.

Arrests for crimes such as Tzul’s is precisely what the mayor did not support during last year’s campaign. He said in interviews that the program he advocated would not target those committing minor crimes, such as the one committed by Tzul. He told me this over coffee almost a year ago. Only “serious” criminal offenses would be targeted was what we heard.

In the interest of fairness, it must be stated up front that Mansoor did not direct the police to detain Tzul, nor were the police acting under any Mansoor-inspired program.

But if the mayor were truly concerned about the city’s relationship with the Latino community, and if he were truly interested in restoring his own credibility, he would have issued a statement distancing himself from the incident and reminding them that he had nothing to do with Tzul’s detention.

Instead, he supported it.

Here’s the quote from the Los Angeles Times story by Jennifer Delson that ran on Jan. 30: “But others, including the mayor of Costa Mesa, applaud the crackdown, even if it means that people who have committed minor crimes are caught in the process.

‘I believe illegal immigration is wrong. It’s breaking the law,’ said Mayor Allan Mansoor, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy.”

Now, we are facing a great likelihood in the odds of the police prediction coming true. Now, over the long haul, we may not only have the same or more illegal immigrants, we could very well see a rise in overall crime as well, due to the fear of some to report crimes.

But wait, there’s more!

Another mayoral disconnect happened just a few days before Tzul’s detention.

During the campaign, we also saw the mayor posing with someone else’s children in an effort to support his claim that he was concerned about kids. It was shameless and I said as much last year.

When the rubber met the road, however, the mayor led the charge to use a technicality to pull the plug on the city’s “Youth in Government” program.

Apparently, the program did not cross all of its “T’s” or dot all of it’s “I’s,” but to those who have watched city hall for awhile, the procedural move looked like something else.

It looked like a petty, small-minded strike at a couple of other council members. A strike that served only to punish kids who wanted to become more involved in the community.

No one should be surprised that the mayor has supported a police action he did not support during his campaign, or that he could very well have sacrificed kids for some political vendetta.

After all, we get the government we deserve.