August 22, 2006
RAMONA – Clint Hamilton says he'd rather be playing softball with his 10-year-old daughter.
Instead, the Ramona resident said “patriotic duty” pushes him to spend at least 20 hours a week trying to stop day laborers from gathering outside the downtown grocery store where he once shopped.
CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune
Albertsons employee Brittney Perdew signs Ramona resident Clint Hamilton's petition to ban day laborers from the store's parking lot. Hamilton says he isn't interested in fighting illegal immigration, but rather fighting loitering.
A one-man Minuteman army, Hamilton videotapes and photographs people hiring workers and said he's been criticized and threatened.
“All I ask them to do is get out of our parking lot,” he said.
Hamilton, 44, speaks in calm tones and wears a U.S. Border Patrol baseball cap. “I'm basically a nice guy,” he said.
Outside a doughnut store in the shopping center, men gathered for coffee on a recent morning said they don't see Hamilton that way.
“He's just racist,” said Antonio Murillo, 75, who buys a pastry and a cup of coffee and spends his mornings chatting with the workers, something he said he has done each morning for more than 15 years.
A retired plumber, Murillo said he feels targeted by Hamilton's cameras because Murillo is Latino. He's a legal U.S. resident, he said, pulling out his residency card. It's not true, as Hamilton contends, that the workers leer at women or urinate in the alley, Murillo said.
Day-labor division
Nationwide and throughout North County, day-labor sites like the one in Ramona have become the most visible staging ground of the illegal immigration debate. In Vista, a day-labor ordinance that requires would-be employers to register with the city is being contested in court.
But how such sites are viewed often depends on who is viewing them. Though he is loosely a member of the San Diego Minutemen, Hamilton prefers acting alone, he said.
He grew up near San Ysidro and served two years in the U.S. Army as a combat medic before returning to run his own construction-related business in San Diego. About 16 years ago he and his wife, Lynnette, bought a house on a one-acre lot in Ramona where they could keep their horses and raise a family, Hamilton said.
The growing number of Latinos looking for work outside his neighborhood Albertsons prompted him to shop elsewhere and begin his protest.
He isn't bothered by the men's legal status, he said.
“I don't like the way they make the street look. We have a beautiful little town in Ramona, and we don't need 100 loitering men,” Hamilton said.
For months, Hamilton has protested by himself at the hiring site. He started off carrying a sign that read “Hire a Patriot, Not an Illegal.”
He and the day laborers both said they yell at each other in the parking lot.
Hamilton sends videotapes and photographs he takes of landscapers, homeowners and other employers picking up the day laborers to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
2006-08-24
07:09:13
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