by Louis Cooper Pensacola News Journal Feb 12, 2008

About 15 people gathered Monday in front of the Santa Rosa County Courthouse to protest recent raids by deputies looking for undocumented workers.

"Hate is growing in our community," said Grace Resendez McCaffery of Pensacola. "The Latin community is outraged. They're seeing this community reverting to a time of intolerance of people of color. We just don't want to see that happen."

McCaffery, who has published the "La Costa Latina" newspaper in Pensacola for the past three years, organized the protest. The protesters lined both sides of U.S. 90 to wave at rush-hour traffic.

The protest came a week after the Sheriff's Office created the Area Improvement Management task force to examine the employment records of businesses to make sure employees supplied valid Social Security numbers.

A raid at Panhandle Growers in Allentown on Feb. 4 found 13 undocumented workers. A raid at La Hacienda restaurants in Milton and Pace on Wednesday netted 10. A raid at El Rodeo Mexican restaurant in Pace on Thursday found none. All of those arrested have been Latino.

Sheriff Wendell Hall, who is at a conference in St. Augustine, defended the raids.

"We're not looking for immigrants. We're looking for undocumented workers," Hall said. "We're enforcing a state law. It has nothing to do with immigration."

McCaffery said her group will "do what we have to do'' to stop the raids.

"We'll seek legal counsel to see if there are any improprieties as far as racial profiling and discrimination," she said.

Protester Adriana Essert of Gulf Breeze, who has dual Colombian/American citizenship, held a sign that read "HALL, YOU'VE LOST MY VOTE."

"The government does not consider that these families come here so their children can get a better education,'' Essert said. "They come for a better life. Sometimes they just send back the father or the mother, and here are the kids without their father or mother.

"It tears my heart. A lot of them have been here for years and years, and still they cannot get citizenship."