The Oregonian, by The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Kong Hee-joon, whose business trip was cut short in 1998, is among those whom U.S. officials at the airport have detained.

Kong Hee-joon flew from South Korea to Portland studying an English phrase book, too excited about his first trip to America to sleep. But Kong, 26, a computer technician dispatched in 1998 to train workers at Hyundai's Eugene factory, never got to use the textbook's polite expressions.

Instead, U.S. immigration inspectors at Portland International Airport rejected his visa, took his belt and shoelaces, handcuffed him and sent him to jail. Kong spent two nights locked in a cell, unable to contact his company or meet with a lawyer before being sent home. At one point, guards chained him to three other inmates.

"Just because one document was missing, they treated me as a serious criminal," Kong said, speaking through an interpreter last week during a telephone interview from South Korea.

Kong's confinement infuriated him and forever changed his view of the United States, a country whose movies, culture and freedoms he had revered as his nation emerged from autocratic rule. "The America you see from the outside," he said, "is not the real America."

Other foreigners -- five in the past four months alone -- have shared Kong's view of the United States from the inside of a jail cell. Each was locked up after being stopped at the airport.

Port of Portland executives, who manage the airport, worry that bad publicity in Asia concerning visa rejections at PDX and jail time for legitimate businessmen jeopardizes Delta Air Lines' remaining international service in Portland.

Shunji Yanai, Japanese ambassador to the United States, intends to raise the issue in immigration talks between the two countries. Yanai fears economic relations between Japan and Oregon will suffer as Japanese citizens avoid Portland's airport.

Senior officials of the U.S. State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service will come to Portland to discuss the subject Thursday. The INS rejects foreigners at the airport nine times as often as it does in Seattle. Northwest members of Congress are complaining to INS inspectors, who insist that rejected foreigners who can't take a return flight out of the country the same day must go to jail.

"That's the law," says David Beebe, INS district director in Portland. "The law says these individuals shall be detained."

To the Portland lawyer who tried to free Kong during his Portland ordeal, the law appears harsh.

"It seems un-American," says Iain Levie of Davis Wright Tremaine. "When you come to America, it's a place where the individual's rights are defended above almost everything."

Kong boarded a Delta flight in Seoul on Oct. 30, 1998, and flew nonstop to Portland. At PDX, a uniformed INS inspector eyed his passport.

The inspector asked for more documents. Kong didn't know what he meant. The inspector phoned Hyundai Semiconductor America. Hyundai called Kong's company subsidiary in Tigard.

The subsidiary's president, who waited two hours at the airport for Kong, rushed back to Tigard. He faxed a contract to the INS showing that Kong would be paid by his Korean company to service a machine and train American workers to use equipment supplied by his firm. He thought that would get Kong through the gate.

But it was too late. The return flight to South Korea had departed. Officials bundled the incredulous Kong into a van bound for the Multnomah County Justice Center jail in downtown Portland. They told him he'd stay there until flying back to Seoul the next day.

Kong stared at his handcuffs. He was too angry to notice Portland's sights on the last in a string of sunny autumn days.

At the jail, Kong lined up with suspected criminals in the basement. Jailers fingerprinted him. They snapped mug shots. They issued him blue pants. They spelled his name "Gong."

Kong told the guards he wasn't a criminal. They put him in a cell.

Kong didn't know that he could request a lawyer. Kong didn't know that Levie and company officials were trying urgently to meet with him.

When a sandwich came, Kong gave it to his cell mate. He was too angry to eat, too mad to sleep.

"Calm down. Calm down," he remembers the cell mate saying. Kong drank only a container of milk.

The next morning, when a guard collected him, Kong expected a ride to the airport. Instead, he was handcuffed again, chained to other inmates and driven to the Multnomah County Courthouse Jail a block away.

There he saw other inmates using a phone. He found his company's local number in the Yellow Pages. He called and got a taped message in English.

He couldn't understand it.

No one took Kong to the airport that day. He spent his second night in America alone in another cell.

Kong didn't know how long he would be held. He didn't know that back in Seoul, a company official went to meet the flight from Portland that he didn't catch.

Kong felt as if he'd walked into "Midnight Express," the movie about the American drug smuggler sentenced to a Turkish prison.

"But the person in the movie did a bad thing," Kong said. "I didn't do anything wrong. That's the difference."

Kong was a professional high-technology worker. He grew up in Suwon outside Seoul and majored in electronics at a three-year technical college. He enjoyed hiking. He liked "Blade Runner" and other American movies, especially admiring Robert DeNiro.

Kong had never been out of South Korea. He'd barely moved out of his parents' house. He'd never been in jail.

Levie, the Portland lawyer, was accustomed to INS jailings. A few weeks before Kong showed up, Levie visited the Justice Center jail to meet another detained Korean technician. Levie says the man was shaking uncontrollably. He stood up immediately to bow to Levie.

"Sit down," a guard yelled at the Korean. The inmate looked around, confused. The guard strode into the cubicle. He shoved the man back in his chair.

But try as he might, Levie couldn't meet with Kong. Neither could the company president in Tigard, who spent hours calling tape-recorded phone greetings at the INS.

A guard awoke Kong early on his second morning. A van took him back to the airport through a steady rain. He waited in a locked room with three other Koreans, who had also been jailed.

Through an interpreter, Kong asked an INS inspector why he was held a second day. The inspector told him it was a mistake.

"Can I get compensation for this extra day?" Kong asked.

"No way," the inspector said.

Beebe, of the INS, cannot explain why Kong was jailed for two nights. Beebe says Kong was seeking unauthorized employment in the United States.

"We do everything within our power to prevent people from having to spend any time in jail," Beebe says.

But Levie says that an INS inspector declined at the time, as usual, to review documents concerning Kong that the agency had requested.

Kong returned to South Korea exhausted and embittered. He took some vacation time. He struggled to regain concentration at work. His company filed a complaint with the INS, a move Kong compared to throwing an egg at a large rock.

Hyundai managers had counted on Kong and other South Korean colleagues to help them gear up their $1.4 billion computer-chip plant. But when another employee of Kong's firm arrived at the airport, the INS gave him a choice: Either wait for us to investigate your case while the return flight leaves for Seoul -- meaning that you risk jail time if we decide against you -- or catch the flight home now.

The technician, knowing what Kong had endured, gave up and flew home.

Because Kong, his colleague and a third technician never reached Eugene, their company was unable to honor its commitment to supply products to Hyundai. Hyundai stopped buying products from their company. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of business went to a South Korean competitor, which managed to get its workers past the INS.

The competitor sold Korean-made products to Hyundai, instead of the U.S.-made products that Kong's company had supplied.

For months after his return, Kong shunned everything American, including Hollywood movies. Finally, he went to see "Saving Private Ryan." He watched the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers trying to save one American life.

"When I saw this movie, I thought how my dignity and worth as a human being were totally denied," Kong said. "Maybe I'm just a foreigner, but I'm still a human being."

Kong hasn't seen an American movie since. When Kong's company gave him another chance to visit the United States, he declined.

"I hope that nobody will go through the same experience that I did," Kong said. "One day I was just a normal citizen, and then I was treated as a criminal."

© 2000, The Oregonian

'I'm just a foreigner, but I'm still a human being:' Yet another infuriating story featuring the Portland INS

The Immigration and Naturalization Service in Portland has a canned explanation -- "It's the law" -- for every indignity it visits on foreigners who run afoul of its regulations.

The excuse is the same whether the Portland office of the INS is keeping a frightened Chinese girl locked up long after she wins political asylum, or handcuffing a legitimate South Korean businessman at the Portland Airport and tossing him in jail for two nights.

However, "It's the law" doesn't begin to answer all of the questions raised about the Portland activities of the INS, including the appalling treatment of Kong Hee-joon, the South Korean computer technician who recently told his story to The Oregonian's Richard Read.

Kong flew to Portland from South Korea in October 1998 to help train workers at Hyundai's Eugene factory. At PDX, a uniformed INS inspector rejected his visa, took his belt and shoelaces, handcuffed him and sent him to Multnomah County jail.

The INS didn't accept the explanations of Kong's employers at Hyundai, or even a faxed copy of a contract showing that Kong would be paid by his Korean company to service a machine and train American workers.

Kong was jailed for not just one, but two days, before being sent back to South Korea. "My dignity and worth as a human being were totally denied," he told Read. "Maybe I'm just a foreigner, but I'm still a human being."

Asian travelers run a far greater risk of this kind of harsh welcome in Portland than at any other West Coast port. INS inspectors turn back travelers here at a rate nine times the Seattle average.

And the usual excuse, "It's the law," doesn't cut it. Inspectors in Seattle, San Francisco and other West Coast ports operate under precisely the same immigration laws. And only Portland INS is turning back and imprisoning people at this alarming rate.

Members of the Oregon and Washington congressional delegations are demanding a better explanation for the activities that are driving away Asian business people, threatening the viability of the last remaining direct flights linking Portland and Japan and posing a real threat to the Northwest economy.

In response to the political pressure, senior officials of the U.S. State Department and the INS will come to Portland Thursday to discuss the issue.

We want to know why there is a disparity of treatment among foreigners coming into American ports. As Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., said in an interview Tuesday, there should be no "backhanded racial profiling."

Foreign travelers ought to be treated the same way wherever they are from, and wherever they land in this country.

It's the law.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Responding to public outrage, U.S. immigration inspectors at Portland International Airport will detain foreigners overnight in guarded hotel rooms instead of jail cells.

When possible, foreigners who miss return flights to Japan after being denied entry to the United States will be flown home through other airports with more connections, according to officials who have been briefed on the plans.

The changes, expected to be announced today by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, will reverse part of a policy that has damaged Portland's international reputation.

"We're just very pleased that Korean nationals will not be housed as common criminals in county jails," said Robert Donaldson, South Korea's honorary consul general in Portland. "They're going to be treated as human beings, and that's what we expect."

Accounts of jailings, forced return flights and rudeness by INS inspectors have scared many foreign business travelers and tourists away from Portland-bound flights, giving the city a bad name in Asia. Delta Air Lines and the Port of Portland, which runs the airport, hosted a breakfast Wednesday to urge businesses to use the Japan flights -- or risk losing them.

Gov. John Kitzhaber tried to repair Portland's image last week during a trade trip to Japan, but bad publicity continued to reverberate across Asia. Several barred foreigners have founded an organization called The Victims' Movement for INS Portland of Japan, meeting with Japanese reporters, diplomats and lawmakers.

The INS, prodded by Northwest members of Congress, plans a seminar in Portland to explain immigration procedures to businesses to avoid problems that lead to people being turned away. The public meeting is scheduled from 9 a.m. to noon Friday in the Bonneville Power Administration auditorium, 905 N.E. 11th Ave.

David Beebe, INS district director in Portland, said Wednesday that some foreigners would still be sent to jail. "We'll still use jail in some circumstances," Beebe said.

Beebe and a deputy declined to explain details of the new policy or confirm descriptions of it. They said that they first wanted to inform congressional staff members, officials and businesspeople who attended a closed meeting with regional INS officials April 27 in Portland.

The regional officials from California at that time promised reforms including consistent West Coast enforcement, cultural sensitivity training for inspectors and potential alternatives to jail. Beebe said that a follow-up meeting including the same "stakeholders" is tentatively scheduled for July 14. He said he wasn't sure whether it would be open to the public, as a regional official said after the last meeting.

Donaldson, the consular official, said that Beebe responded recently to an official inquiry by the South Korean government, stating that inadmissible foreigners would be housed in a hotel with a guard at the door before returning to Japan the next day. Foreigners with forged documents or other criminal conduct would still be sent to jail.

Managers of the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel and the Hampton Inn Portland Airport have agreed to accommodate the guarded foreigners, said Harold Pollin, who owns both hotels. Airport hoteliers noted that rejected foreigners tend to be businesspeople or tourists who pose no security threat.

"It will be an improvement over what I have read to be a situation that hurt some feelings," Pollin said.

The INS plans to allow barred foreigners who miss same-day return flights to fly back to Japan through other West Coast airports if possible, Donaldson said. He plans to continue to compare Portland inspectors' rejection rate with those of INS officials at other airports.

Suzanne Miller, Port of Portland aviation marketing general manager, confirmed that the INS would switch from jail cells to hotel rooms, and welcomed the move. Miller met last week in Seoul with the INS Asian regional director concerning the problems.

"We want people to know that we feel this has been addressed quite well," Miller said, "and that if they have been routing their passengers to other gateways to please come back and try again."

A Delta Air Lines official also welcomed the new INS stance as a significant step. "There are still companies that are not bringing their travelers through Portland because of the INS problem," said David Zielke, Delta district sales manager in Portland.

Zielke said that Delta's remaining two daily nonstop routes between Portland and Japan have yielded modest revenue increases in recent months. But revenues remain less than desired as some passengers connect to Japan through other West Coast airports, he said.

The number of people flying from Oregon to Japan on all airlines through all airports has declined almost 6 percent during the past two years, said Zielke, who did not release total figures. Fallout from Asia's economic crisis and Japan's recession continues to depress business travel.

Local business leaders warn that loss of Delta's Japan flights would lead to job cuts, reduced trade and investment, damage to Portland's international stature and likely cancellation of domestic flights serving the airline's Asian gateway.Portland's only other international air service is to Canada.

Sho Dozono, Azumano Travel president, plans to create a task force to support the Delta flights to Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan. Dozono hopes to bring a Portland delegation to Nagoya this year to enlist support in the Japanese industrial center.

"We have not really done anything to foster this city-to-city relationship," Dozono said.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Immigration inspectors jailed an innocent Chinese businesswoman for two nights after rejecting her passport Saturday, following earlier promises to avoid jailing travelers in all but aggravated cases.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service managers defended their actions Tuesday after letting Guo Liming resume her trip to New York via Portland International Airport. They said they considered the case aggravated because Guo, 36, appeared typical of Chinese sneaking into the United States. They blamed her for not replacing a passport that looked doctored but turned out to be authentic.

Guo said INS inspectors made her strip to her underwear for a search. They interrogated her under oath through an interpreter. Then they handcuffed her for the two-hour drive to jail in The Dalles. "They owe me an apology," she said.

The jailing revived nagging questions concerning INS conduct at the Portland airport, where inspectors reject a far higher percentage of foreigners than are turned away from other West Coast airports. Last January, Guo used the same passport to enter the United States without incident in Los Angeles.

Many Asian companies and travel agents continue to advise travelers to avoid Portland, hurting sales for Delta Air Lines, despite INS promises of reforms, such as substituting guarded hotel rooms for jail cells. Japanese newspapers published a story this month by Kyodo, a Japanese wire service, that reiterated the problems without mentioning the reforms.

The controversy could end shortly if Delta grounds its remaining flights between Portland and Japan, as airport managers think likely, leaving PDX without overseas air service. Increased competition and long-range planes are the main culprits, Port of Portland officials say, not fallout from the INS controversy.

Guo arrived in Portland Saturday on a flight from Japan with Hsieh Tsuhui, 43, her fiance and business partner. The couple planned to proceed to New York on business.

Guo, a resident of Guangzhou, China, handed her passport to an INS inspector, who found it suspicious.

"It had all the outward appearances of the kinds of bogus documentation we've seen in the past presented by PRC nationals," said David Beebe, INS district director in Portland. "China has been a problem to PDX in terms of either photo-substituted passports or fraudulent visas."

Beebe said the passport's original clear plastic laminate had been peeled back, causing inspectors to think that a photo had been substituted and a second laminate applied. Guo also "fit the profile" of attempted illegal immigrants, Beebe said, because she was traveling with another person. In the past 19 months, Portland has had nine such cases, said John O'Brien, INS port director.

The inspectors began processing Guo for "expedited removal," preparing to place her on a return flight to Japan. They sent photo scans of the passport to an East Coast forensics lab for analysis by experts.

"About six of these federal experts apparently agonized and discussed at length their observations," Beebe said. The experts attributed the double lamination to "a very poor job of quality control" at the Chinese passport office.

On Monday, they told Portland INS inspectors that the passport was valid. Guo was released from the Northern Oregon Regional Corrections Facility in The Dalles, where the agency sends its detainees. She was driven back to the airport and admitted to the United States. Airport immigration officials have jailed six or seven foreigners in aggravated cases since arranging for hotel rooms June 1.

"At the jail, they had kept $1,300 that I was carrying in cash," Guo said. "When they released me, they gave me a check for that amount.

"I've gone to three banks, but they refuse to cash it because I'm not a resident."

Guo said no one ever apologized to her. O'Brien said inspectors apologized profusely Monday night.

But Tuesday, Beebe said Guo should have replaced her passport after encountering problems with it earlier in Hong Kong. "If I had that problem, I sure the hell would have taken care of it," Beebe said. He said inspectors confronted with a similar case in the future would follow exactly the same procedures.

Beebe could not explain why immigration inspectors in Los Angeles would have accepted Guo's passport. And it was unclear Tuesday whether Guo's problems in Hong Kong occurred on her current trip or earlier.

Guo did not have time to describe her Hong Kong experience during an interview with The Oregonian on Tuesday as she hurried to catch her flight to New York. A calm, poised woman, she spoke with bitterness but self-control of her ordeal, during which she said she was chained as well as handcuffed.

Guo declined to disclose her company name or the nature of her business, saying that the firm wouldn't want the publicity. She hesitated to talk to a reporter for fear of retribution by the INS, but said she planned to carry the article with her on future trips as a means of explanation.

Guo said that she was unable to contact a lawyer, the Chinese consulate or anyone outside the jail during the weekend. Hsieh, her fiance, didn't know where she was until Monday morning when he hired Bao Lin Chen, a Portland immigration lawyer, to find her.

"They asked me whether we have any human rights protection," Chen said. "That's a kind of question a person asks in China, not this country.

"It wasn't her mistake, but she was treated like a criminal."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Elected officials ranging from a U.S. senator to Oregon's governor expressed outrage Wednesday and called for the resignation of David Beebe, district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Portland.

As calls for federal investigations escalated, Beebe launched his own investigation of two INS officers who made a Chinese businesswoman strip to her underwear for a search Saturday. Beebe said he didn't know what to make of the resignation calls because, other than possibly the search, his inspectors merely followed standard procedures in jailing the woman.

"No doubt about it, Beebe should resign or be fired," said Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., according to his spokeswoman, Cynthia Bergman. Gorton has led efforts to improve INS practices at Portland International Airport, where unusually high numbers of foreigners have been refused entry to the United States.

State Sen. Avel Gordly, D-Portland, called The Oregonian on Wednesday to make public her demand for Beebe's resignation. She accused INS inspectors at the airport of "racism and xenophobia."

Other politicians contacted by The Oregonian who also called for Beebe's replacement included U.S. Rep. David Wu, Rep. Peter DeFazio and Rep. Darlene Hooley, all D-Ore. Gov. John Kitzhaber described the jailing of the innocent woman, whom INS officials suspected of using a doctored passport, as the final straw in a series of problems.

Kitzhaber, Portland Mayor Vera Katz and Port of Portland Executive Director Mike Thorne appealed to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno for an investigation into the district office's enforcement practices.

The latest incident involved Guo Liming, a 36-year-old Chinese businesswoman who arrived at Portland's airport Saturday with a passport that appeared to INS inspectors to have been altered. Two women inspectors made Guo strip to her underwear for a visual search before she was interrogated, handcuffed and jailed for two nights in The Dalles.

INS inspectors released Guo on Monday and allowed her to resume her business trip after experts determined her passport was valid. The jailing came after months of controversy concerning the INS, which has promised reforms including cultural sensitivity training and the use of guarded hotel rooms instead of jail cells in all but the most serious cases.

Beebe disclosed Wednesday that an INS officer failed to tell a supervisor Sunday to return a call to Guo's fiance, Hsieh Tsuhui, who was trying to find her. Hsieh ultimately hired a lawyer to locate Guo. Beebe said he might launch a separate investigation into the officer's lapse.

"I just don't know what to say" about the resignation calls, said Beebe, who initially said that Wu, Thorne and Gordly should file complaints with the inspector general. "We were following established procedures for the handling of this case."

Strip-searches by INS officials are extremely rare, however, said Peter Gordon, assistant regional director of inspections at INS Western regional headquarters in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Gordon, who was displeased to learn of the incident from news reports, said he wasn't aware of a strip-search being conducted by the INS in his seven-state region since he took his post a year ago.

"We're trying to get to the bottom of this," Gordon said. Virginia Kice, INS regional public affairs director, said, "We owe the woman an apology and the community an apology."

During a news conference Wednesday, Beebe said inspectors should only ask a supervisor for permission to conduct a strip-search if a pat-down search results in suspicion of a concealed item, such as a weapon. Strip-searches are conducted by an officer of the same gender as the traveler, he said, in the presence of a supervisor of the same gender.

Beebe declined to disclose the names of the officers who conducted the search.

Beebe, 55, makes $110,000 a year as district director, a post he has held since 1988. The nation's 33 district directors are appointed by the INS commissioner on the recommendation of a review board of senior managers.

Beebe joined the INS in 1975 in Minneapolis after completing a master's degree in industrial relations at Iowa State University. A recreational pilot who lives in Beaverton, he served in the U.S. Air Force.

Katz wrote Wednesday to Doris Meissner, INS commissioner, suggesting Beebe's replacement and calling the treatment of Guo "monstrous."

Katz, Kitzhaber and Thorne wrote to Reno asking for a Justice Department investigation of INS Portland enforcement practices.

"Ms. Guo was obviously badly mistreated," they said, "and INS officials should be held accountable for this disturbing incident."

© 2000, The Oregonian

Time has run out for the embarrassing thugs and bumblers at the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Portland.

In their latest outrage, they jailed a Chinese businesswoman, whose misfortune -- and only crime -- was to arrive at the Portland International Airport with a tattered passport.

Portland immigration inspectors deemed Guo Liming's passport "suspicious." They forced her to strip to her underwear, searched her, interrogated her, handcuffed her for transport to The Dalles and jailed her for two nights -- before concluding [how inconvenient for them] that her passport was valid.

"It's a Gestapo mentality," said an appalled Mike Thorne, head of the Port of Portland. "I don't know where these guys get off."

Thorne joined state Sen. Avel Gordly, D-Portland, Wednesday in calling for the resignation of David Beebe, head of the Portland INS office. "We're at the last straw," Thorne said. "I'm willing to burn the last bridge."

He's right. The time has elapsed for quiet interventions or reforms from within.

Consider the two "clues" Portland INS inspectors used to deduce that Liming's passport might be counterfeit.

• She made the mistake of traveling with another person -- her fiance and business partner, as it happens.
• The original clear plastic laminate on her passport had been peeled back.

Wear and tear on a passport is a proud badge of cosmopolitanism for many a traveler, but INS officials apparently believe that counterfeiters advertise their fakery with a visible sign of a clumsy job.

Isn't it more likely that a fake would be slick, new and not call attention to itself? Guo's passport, in any case, raised no eyebrows when she used it to enter the country last January in Los Angeles.

But then, that discrepancy epitomizes the whole, strange saga of the Portland INS office. The agency has made itself conspicuous on the West Coast -- and notorious in the Asian community -- by rejecting foreign travelers at a much higher rate than other West Coast airports do.

What makes this recent fiasco all the more dumbfounding is that airport immigration officials have been on notice for months that they are under scrutiny. They apparently remain oblivious, even to the intensifying drumbeat of criticism.

As we've said before, their callous treatment of Asian visitors is tarnishing Portland's reputation, jeopardizing international flights, and Pacific Rim commerce. A Port of Portland study estimated that $900 million worth of economic benefits are at stake if the flights disappear.

Port officials have been working for two years -- for a long time, quietly -- to change INS practices. In the last few months, immigration officials seemed to be waking up to the need for changes, and made a number of promises. For one thing, they said they would stop jailing foreign travelers in most cases and use guarded hotel rooms, instead. These promises are now shown to be worth nothing.

This is a federal agency that, in Portland at least, is out of control. That can't continue. Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith must demand new leadership and insist that the agency clean house.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Julie Sullivan

Oregonian Staff

The morning after the governor, the mayor and members of Congress demanded that he resign, David V. Beebe arrived at his desk, as always, just after 6 a.m.

As critics jammed telephone lines to his supervisors in California and Washington, D.C., Beebe worked alone in the locked, polished stillness of his fourth-floor office. His staff of 135, stationed mostly on the floors around him, were somber. Friends chatting on their lawns near his Beaverton home shared a hushed concern. But the telephone on Beebe's immaculate desk was noticeably quiet.

As district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Beebe is Mr. INS, the point man for immigration law in Oregon. His signature is stamped or signed on almost every significant paper that deals with deporting criminals, arresting illegal workers, approving steps toward citizenship. His name also appears on orders that divide families, incite attorneys and has now mobilized furious business and political critics.

For four months, his handling of INS rejections of Asian travelers at Portland International Airport has drawn a steady stream of senior INS and U.S. State Department officials to Portland, where his methodical, precise response has exasperated even the regional INS public relations director.

"She says I'm a total disaster," Beebe said of his image. "And she's probably right. It's not like I'm oblivious to that, but I have to be who I am rather than project a veneer of something I'm not."

When reports of Portland's unusually high rates of refusals at PDX drew a chorus of critics in April, Beebe responded exactly as he has in 12 years as district director, with little apology or emotion. He held lengthy public meetings and seminars, explaining in sometimes excruciating detail the alphabet soup of immigration forms and protocol. He telephoned business executives, wrote lengthy explanatory letters and is frankly flabbergasted that so many of the people he's been calling are the very ones calling for his head.

"I thought we were building bridges," he said.

Instead, critics are building a case that Beebe's office is out of sync even with the INS, operating with a draconian mindset that threatens international business and tourist traffic.

Beebe, the man who for 25 years has enforced the nation's immigration law, to the letter of the law, is finding for the first time in that pursuit, no sanctuary.

A supervisor who treats employees with a familial loyalty is having to publicly question his staff. A federal official who has embodied strict policy with no display of private feelings is facing a fight that feels very personal. A fight that, as in so much of his life, he faces largely on his own.

Attending to detail

Last year, 94,000 "customers" approached the counter of the Portland INS. The line of immigrants, refugees, adoptive parents and newlyweds forms outside the stained stone walls of the unmarked federal building on Northwest Broadway as early as 7 a.m.

But Beebe is always there first.

Neighbors can set their watches by the 55-year-old civil servant: up at 3:45 a.m. for calisthenics, out the garage door by 6 a.m., in the office 14 minutes later in a dark suit and silk tie. Beebe is 6-foot-2, 170 pounds of self-discipline who controls high blood pressure through habit. He takes the stairs, never elevators. He takes walks, not lunch. He never has more than a single glass of wine. He trims his lawn Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork.

Neighbor Bob Eurick, a retired Portland battalion fire chief, had no reservations about loaning Beebe his small airplane. Beebe insisted on renting the plane, always paying more than necessary, returning it with the fuel tank full and the windshield clean. Eventually, Beebe bought his own plane, a 1980 Piper Turbo Arrow that he prefers to fly at 6,000 feet, where "it's safer." The two men, close friends whose families spend holidays together, fly to Independence for breakfast or Sisters for the weekend. Still, Beebe spends more time maintaining the plane than he ever does flying.

"He always does everything he's supposed to do first," said Eurick.

For Beebe, flying was always more than recreation. It was a way out.

"I came," he said, "from dust." He was born in Minden, Iowa, population 400, the second child of the publisher of the Minden Times, who died of a stroke when Beebe was 1.

His mother remarried and had two more daughters. Shortly after the youngest was born, his mother was infected during a polio epidemic and within three weeks, died. Beebe was an orphan by age 7.

His mother's husband, who never adopted him, struggled to farm 120 acres with four small children. Beebe walked each morning to a one-room school with no running water. But he had to get his work done first: up at 3:45 a.m. to hand milk the cows.

When he was 12, they lost the farm. Beebe went to work alongside his stepfather at a gas station in town. The stepfather, meanwhile, had married a woman with three children. She did not like Beebe, threatening to put him in an orphanage and taking little interest in his well-being.

What saved him were his schoolmates, "my contact with reality," and the planes crossing the Iowa skies. From the time his mother died, he dreamed of flying. He graduated from high school on a Thursday night in 1963 and by Sunday morning was en route to the Air Force.

It was only when he arrived at boot camp that he learned he needed to be an officer to fly, and he needed a college degree to be an officer. He instead was assigned to Bitburg, Germany, where he worked on guidance systems for missiles. At 19, he got his recreational pilot's license and his first sense of belonging.

Nine fellow airmen became his "brothers" while the military's bearing, structure, ethics and demand for personal responsibility became his foundation.

His "brothers," all college-bound, convinced him to start university studies. His high school grades were so poor that Iowa State University accepted him only on probationary status after his discharge. But once there, Beebe blazed through in three years, earning a bachelor of science degree in sociology and psychology, intending to return to the Air Force.

When poor eyesight ended his dreams of becoming a military pilot, he worked in real estate and for a telephone company before returning to Iowa State to earn a master's degree in industrial relations. By then, he had married his wife, Kathy, and was the father of his only child.

In 1975, he went to work for the INS, rising from employee relations specialist to program analyst to deputy district director in St. Paul, Minn. In 1988, he became acting director of the Portland office, made permanent four months later.

Oregon, though a small district, offered the authority, autonomy and field work he wanted. He arrived just as the office's first personal computers were being unloaded, the first sign of a new era.

A mammoth job

In the years since, the INS grew into the largest federal law enforcement agency in the nation and the Oregon staff doubled. In 1999, Beebe's office tallied the arrests of 2,200 illegal immigrants and processed 23,000 applications for immigration benefits.

"The job," he said, "is mammoth."

From the beginning, Beebe has been a student of efficiency, studying methodologies and where bottlenecks of paperwork choke the system. People still have to wait nine to 12 months for their documents, but the time is less than half the national average. When the Oregon congressional delegation last year asked the Portland office to track the paperwork of constituents' cases, Beebe responded with a worker and a pie chart on how fast queries were answered.

"He's a very, very dedicated public servant," said Gunther Hoffmann, the honorary German consul.

Such meticulousness earned Beebe an award for service from the Oregon Consular Corps in 1998. But it also strengthened his reputation as a technocrat, efficient but cold.

In an office that often deals with people fleeing persecution, poverty and war whose lack of English and money render them helpless, the process frequently seems remote, the leader devoid of sympathy.

"We have to move away from that term (sympathy) in terms of the performance of my duties," Beebe said. The INS must be impartial, he emphasized.

"If we allow personal opinions or feelings to inadvertently be factored in, we've compromised the oath to which we have all been sworn."

Unlike some district directors, he has almost never given people a break, believing that the place for discretion and sympathy is in immigration court.

"He lives by the book, strictly by the regulations," said his son, Capt. Bryant Beebe, 28, an artillery officer at Fort Sill, Okla. Beebe talks to his son almost daily, as does his wife, Kathy, who works at the Housing Authority of Portland.

Beebe says the most important things in his life are his family, his faith -- he's a stalwart member of St. Matthew's Lutheran Church in Beaverton -- and his duty. He believes he is keeping the nation safe and protecting jobs for its citizens.

On Monday, Beebe will meet with his boss, the INS regional director, and the elected officials demanding his resignation.

In the silence of his office last week, he picked up the telephone to call them, then put it down again.

"I've always been left on my own," he said.

Oregonian researchers Gail Hulden, Lovelle Svart and Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

German citizen Claudia Young admits she made a mistake in the process of moving to Oregon last year with her American husband.

But for coming to the United States without the proper visa, Young has paid a terrible price at the hands of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

On July 17, Portland INS officers detained her. A day later, INS officers abruptly separated Young, 34, from the daughter she was breast-feeding. They handcuffed and chained her. Jailers strip-searched her twice fully naked, she says, as her breasts became painfully engorged with milk meant for 13-month-old Rachel.

The INS deported Young -- without Rachel -- on July 20 and barred her for 10 years from the United States.

Now, as Claudia scrapes by, selling cuckoo clocks to U.S. tourists in Germany's Black Forest, her husband, Rick, staves off bankruptcy caring for Rachel near Roseburg.

International phone calls are expensive, and Claudia's access to e-mail is limited. "Tell Rick I love him," she said during a telephone interview last week. "I miss him. And tell him to give Rachel a big hug."

W. Scott Cihlar, INS Portland district assistant director for detention and removals, said Monday that the law gave officers no choice but to deport Claudia Young immediately. But he said officers would seek other solutions if a similar case surfaced again.

"Maybe if this comes up again, which I hope it doesn't," Cihlar said, "we're going to try something else."

The INS confirmed last week that its Portland district office, in the face of strong public pressure, would begin actively seeking all possible avenues of relief for foreigners married to Americans.

The philosophic shift, which regional INS officials are expected to feature today when they respond to calls for the replacement of Portland district director David Beebe, already resulted in a stay of deportation last week for the Guatemalan wife of a local Intel manager.

But the change is little consolation to the Youngs and scores of other U.S.-foreign couples who ran afoul of laws enforced to the letter by Beebe's office.

"Spouses of American citizens get into more trouble, and it does cause a lot of grieving and family separations," says Libby Page, district aide to Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who is working on the Youngs' case. "This case is an ugly, ugly pickle."

Johnny Williams, INS Western regional director in Laguna Niguel, Calif., plans to announce in Portland today the preliminary results of an internal review of Beebe and his district. Ten members of the Northwest congressional delegation, most of whom have called for Beebe's removal, also plan to meet with INS Commissioner Doris Meissner on Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Rick Young could give up and move back to Germany, where he lived 20 years before the couple moved to Ore-

gon to start their family. But after saving for years to make the move, he thinks he and his wife are entitled to live in his country.

"We just wanted to have a simple American dream," Young said. "Where are our rights? Where are Rachel's rights?"

The Youngs arrived in Oregon on Feb. 2, 1999. Their troubles with the INS began June 16 when U.S. Border Patrol officers knocked on the door of the family's house trailer in Idleyld Park northeast of Roseburg. Claudia showed them her completed application for U.S. residency, which she had yet to file.

The officers, accompanied by a sheriff's deputy, told Claudia she was an illegal alien because she had exceeded her 90-day permissible stay. But she understood that instead of opting to leave the country within 30 days, she could go to the Portland INS office to adjust her status for a few hundred dollars in fees.

"They made it sound like, if you go up there and file all this paperwork now, everything will be all right," Claudia said. "Only later, the INS Portland office said the Border Patrol made a big mistake; they should have arrested me right away."

The first time the Youngs traveled to Portland, on July 7, they arrived too late because the INS phone greeting hadn't mentioned the office closed to applicants each morning upon reaching capacity. On July 17, they awoke at 3 a.m., packed Rachel's supplies and drove north again through construction delays, barely gaining admission to the waiting room by closing time.

Claudia says that supervisor Paige Edenfield told her that by signing the arrival form on the flight to the United States Feb. 2, 1999, she had given up her right to apply for permanent residency. The form, issued under the visa waiver program, allows tourists from countries including Germany to enter the United States without visas.

In fact, Claudia says, she tried to apply for a three-year visa at the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, before she left. But the consulate returned the application shortly before her departure, telling her she had to apply for a different type of visa, but not saying she should do so before she left.

At the Portland INS office, Edenfield said Claudia would be deported immediately. "You're not the first person," Claudia recalls Edenfield saying, "who's turned themselves in without knowing it."

Cihlar said Monday that because Rick Young had not already filed a petition to gain permanent residency for her, the INS had no choice but to deport her. Young says that the officers would not accept his filled-out petition form.

Two INS officers escorted Claudia and Rachel to a guarded hotel room. Rick, 46, drove four hours home to Idleyld Park to pack two suitcases for Claudia that he was told to deliver to INS in Portland by 8 a.m. the next day.

Two pairs of INS officers guarded Claudia and Rachel in two shifts overnight in a hotel suite. But the next morning, airline representatives refused to allow Rachel to board the plane because the child had no passport.

INS officers handcuffed and chained Claudia, sending her to Yamhill County Jail. Rachel was given to Rick, who says he was not told that he could have applied for an expedited U.S. or German passport for Rachel. At the jail, Claudia was strip-searched according to procedures used routinely for inmates thought to pose particular risk.

Cihlar said the INS "probably" could have detained Claudia Young while her husband obtained an expedited passport for Rachel. "They didn't ask for any kind of stay," Cihlar said.

The next morning, July 19, two INS officers escorted Claudia back to the PDX airline counter for a flight to San Francisco, where she would change planes for Frankfurt, Germany. After numerous delays, the airline canceled the flight. Claudia went back to jail, where she was again strip-searched and booked.

"I was totally in tears because now my breasts were hurting so bad, and I was shaking, and I couldn't believe this was going to happen again," said Claudia, who had been breast-feeding Rachel five times a day. A guard gave Claudia some ice packs, which soon melted.

Guards awoke Claudia at 4 a.m. July 20. This time, the flight took off for San Francisco, with Claudia and two INS officers aboard.

One of the officers slipped her a $20 bill from his own pocket so she wouldn't arrive penniless in Frankfurt.

"He showed he was a human being," Young said.

Back in the trailer park northeast of Roseburg, Rachel cried for her mother, refusing milk and formula for weeks. Rick closed his storefront computer consulting business, thwarted by the high cost of child care for Rachel, whose beginning German was incomprehensible to baby sitters.

Bills mounted. He proceeded to launch a modest Internet business with a partner and to do yard work. Money dwindled, but Rick avoided applying for public assistance, fearing that receiving benefits would weaken the couple's standing in the eyes of the INS.

Rick did spend $95 applying for a passport for Rachel, but the application was returned -- without the fee -- because Claudia could not come for an interview to be listed with him on the passport. The couple faces an expensive, time-consuming process in applying for a waiver from her 10-year ban from the United States, which would allow her to resume her immigration application.

Page, in DeFazio's office, said that INS officials told congressional aides recently that in the future, spouses of U.S. citizens who arrive without the proper visa will be given a "deferred inspection" instead of being returned home. And the Portland district director will be able to exercise discretion in such cases, allowing a spouse to remain in the United States while the application proceeds, Page said.

The development comes as little consolation to Claudia, who sleeps on a couch in the basement of her parents' house in Buchenbach, Germany, near the Swiss border.

Claudia, an experienced bilingual secretary, works in the tourist shop and waits for news of her first child's progress. She hears that Rachel can say some English words.

On Monday, Cihlar called Page of DeFazio's office, saying that Beebe had decided that his office -- instead of the backlogged INS service center in Nebraska -- would process the Youngs' paperwork to begin the process of getting Claudia permanent residency. Rick Young remains bitter, but Page said the officials' concession was significant.

"I wish they could undo things," Page said. "But they are willing to bend."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read and Julie Sullivan

Oregonian Staff

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's Portland district director, David Beebe, departed the agency under pressure Tuesday, but elected officials and community leaders aren't satisfied that his retirement will resolve their complaints.

Beebe told employees Tuesday he would retire Oct. 3 after months of public outrage over his rigid, isolated management style. Northwest members of Congress plan to present a list of demands to INS Commissioner Doris Meissner on Thursday, requesting more humane treatment of foreigners and U.S. citizens, better access to track cases and further training for employees in Oregon.

"It took a long time to get the attention of upper management of the INS about the problems in Portland, and now that we have their attention, we don't want to lose it," said U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.

Meissner telephoned Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., early Tuesday to announce Beebe's retirement from the $114,000-a-year position. Beebe went on leave immediately after addressing about 40 of his 130 employees during a morning meeting.

The 25-year agency veteran, who led the Portland office for 12 years, later declined, through his wife, to be interviewed. Virginia Kice, public affairs director for the INS Western region, said she and Beebe had tears in their eyes when they hugged before he left the government building downtown.

"The last few months have been painful for everyone," Beebe said in a statement read to reporters by his boss, the INS Western region director, Johnny Williams. "I hope that my retirement will refocus the spotlight on the many positive contributions the men and women who work for the INS have made."

Williams, who apologized to the region for the agency's conduct, said that a Sept. 11 report by an agency task force found the Portland district suffers from:

• Heavy-handed enforcement of laws that ought to allow more humane treatment of foreigners. "The rigid way we enforced the law was an issue we want to look at."
• A breakdown in communications between the office and the community, which spawned distrust. "There was no way for people to have communication with the district director."
• Deficient customer service provided by employees. "There is an 'S' in the INS."
• Insufficient training of employees, who are disconnected from superiors. "Many times employees felt they already knew the answers to questions."

Williams said that he was most troubled by the "disconnect" between the INS and the community. "On behalf of the INS," he said, "let me extend our sincere apologies and sorrow that this has occurred."

Kice declined to release the report, saying Williams needed to edit and polish it. She said he might add plans for action before making the report public in a couple of weeks.

Last month, elected officials ranging from Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber to Northwest members of Congress called for Beebe's replacement. They expressed outrage after The Oregonian reported on rejections and jailings of foreigners arriving at Portland International Airport. INS officers this summer strip-searched and jailed a Chinese businesswoman later declared innocent, and deported a German woman without her breast-feeding child after jailers strip-searched her.

Williams said Tuesday the regional INS office would review the case of the German woman, Claudia Young. Results of an investigation by agency headquarters into treatment of the businesswoman -- Guo Liming, who has sued the officers and filed a $500,000 claim against the government -- are expected within three weeks.

© 2000, The Oregonian

Finally, the stern facade of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Portland has crumbled under community demands for a more humane, respectful and open agency.

David Beebe, the district director ultimately responsible for the harsh, take-all-prisoners philosophy at the Portland office, announced his retirement to INS employees Tuesday.

Beebe's departure is certainly welcome, but it won't fix all that's wrong with the Portland office. In a news conference Tuesday, Johnny Williams, the INS Western regional director, pledged to repair what he called a "disconnect" between the immigration office and the citizens it serves. He also offered his "sincere apologies and sorrow" for the heartless and appalling treatment of some people by the Portland INS.

There's much to be sorry about. The terrified Chinese girl held in jail long after she had been granted legal asylum. The worst-on-the-West-Coast treatment of foreigners arriving at Portland International Airport; foreign visitors to Portland were rejected -- and sometimes jailed --at a rate four times that of those arriving in Seattle.

The Aug. 19 strip-search and jailing of a Chinese businesswoman later determined to be innocent by inspectors who thought her passport was doctored. And, in a story reported by The Oregonian's Richard Read on Tuesday, the infuriating case of a German mother abruptly separated from the baby daughter she was breast-feeding, handcuffed, chained and twice strip-searched before being deported.

Beebe, the district director, wasn't personally involved in all of these outrageous cases. Yet he was responsible for creating the rigid, impersonal, by-the-book culture in the Portland INS office that allowed every one of them to occur on his watch.

Williams didn't offer many specifics about changes coming to the Portland office, beyond a replacement for Beebe and likely a new public liaison designed to improve communication between the INS and the public. On that score, the agency could begin by releasing its report on a recently completed management review of the Portland office. A finished report was turned over to Williams, however an INS spokeswoman on Tuesday said it needed more "polishing."

Williams spoke a great deal Tuesday about the need for better, more open communication between the INS and the citizens it serves. That ought to start now, with the release of the management report, and full disclosure of the problems the agency discovered in its Portland office.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Kim Christensen, Richard Read, Julie Sullivan and Brent Walth
Oregonian Staff

Murder suspects have more rights than many people who encounter the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service - and not just the 1.6 million the agency catches trying to sneak across the Mexican border each year.

While its role as protector of the nation's borders shapes the INS' most visible and enduring image, its heavy hand falls on people most Americans will never see.

They are children as young as 8 who are held in a secretive network of prisons and county jails.

They are parents and spouses of U.S. citizens, who are deported or imprisoned without due process of law; the asylum seekers who are greeted not with the promise of haven, but with jail.

They are people for whom the Statue of Liberty stands not as a beacon of hope and welcome, but as a symbol of iron-fisted rejection.

"The INS is like an onion," says U.S. Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill., whose constituents complain more about the agency than anything else. "The more you peel it away, the more you cry."

Earlier this year, Portland was widely derided and then dubbed "Deportland" by an Internet news service after INS officials rejected scores of foreign travelers at the airport. Officers strip-searched and jailed a Chinese businesswoman and sent the German wife of a U.S. citizen back to Europe without her nursing baby.

The incidents sparked international controversy, hastened the retirement of Portland District Director David Beebe and prompted a top-down review of the operation he oversaw.

But they only skimmed the surface of the agency's problems, which run much deeper than the Portland office and reach far beyond the Northwest.

In a four-month investigation, The Oregonian found that the INS:

• Holds 20,000 people in a secretive and poorly monitored network of prisons and county jails that often subjects them to abuse, loses track of them and sends them from jail to jail - often far from their families and lawyers.
• Jails youthful victims of sexual abuse and other vulnerable children alongside criminal offenders - violating legal agreements to move them to safer, less restrictive facilities.
• Breaks up families by jailing or deporting relatives of U.S. citizens for minor offenses or decades-old crimes.
• Mistreats some asylum seekers, who flee persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States or sent back to life-threatening situations without regard for the dangers that await.
• Tolerates racism and sexual abuse in its ranks and has one of the highest rates of misconduct among federal law-enforcement agencies.
• Allows district directors and sector chiefs such as Portland's Beebe to run their 57 jurisdictions as fiefdoms, applying the law unevenly.
• Overworks its employees, whose low pay, grueling work conditions and difficult mission demoralize officers and invite abuse.
• Bungles immigration cases, including those of U.S. citizens who are wrongly deported and imprisoned.

"Even I, a longtime backer, believe something has to be done with the agency," says Gene McNary, the Bush administration INS commissioner from 1989 through 1992. "I believe it's broke. It has to be fixed."

Often under attack

Many Americans support strict limits on immigration, an issue that continues to roil in Congress. It also has sparked such controversial initiatives as California's Proposition 187, which in 1994 sought to curb public spending on illegal immigrants. The measure passed, but was later invalidated by the courts.

But there's more to the debate than how many immigrants should be let in, and at what cost.

"It is not about admitting the people," says Wendy Young, director of government relations and U.S. programs for the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. "It's about treating people with respect while they go through the process."

Without question, the INS faces enormous challenges in carrying out its dual mission of enforcing immigration laws and administering benefits such as citizenship, asylum and work permits. As part of the Justice Department, the agency is overseen by Attorney General Janet Reno.

Its 32,000 employees oversee more than 300 ports of entry and patrol 6,000 miles of borders with Canada and Mexico.

In a single year, the agency will field 5 million applications for citizenship, work permits and other benefits. It will catch more than 1.6 million illegal immigrants along the Southwest border, many desperate and willing to do whatever it takes to get into the United States.

It is a huge job, and often a thankless one for INS employees who are overworked and overwhelmed by the sheer crush of people trying to gain entry to the United States or win citizenship after they arrive here.

The agency stands as everyone's whipping boy, buffeted by public sentiment that both celebrates America as the world's melting pot and frets about immigrants overrunning the borders.

"Just being in the United States has got to be like gold around the world," says INS spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar, explaining why barriers to entry are high. "We all recognize what a precious commodity it is. We try to make sure to the best of our ability that those who lawfully can be (here) are allowed to be here."

Still, Democrats and Republicans slap the INS with equal vigor.

"We doubled their budget in four years, and we did not get double the results," complains U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims.

"We got minor improvement in some areas, but we didn't get our money's worth. It's part mismanagement, part lack of desire to enforce the law or selective enforcement of the law."

Even as human-rights advocates accuse the INS of being overzealous, anti-immigration groups blast it as too lax.

"We have an ineffective immigration service," says Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which contends too many newcomers adversely affect jobs, education, health care and crime in the United States.

"There is virtually no interior enforcement," he says. "It has collapsed. It's not there. An American citizen who feels like the landlord next door might be smuggling aliens can't even get an INS agent to come out there and check out what's going on."

Agency says strides made

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner refused The Oregonian's repeated requests for interviews over a four-month period before resigning Nov. 17. Acting Commissioner Mary Ann Wyrsch, who took over for her, defends the INS and rebuts its critics' contentions and The Oregonian's findings.

"I don't think the agency is broken," she says. "I think that it does some things very, very well."

She says that years ago, the INS was "an agency in crisis," run by political operatives of both parties rather than by immigration professionals. But despite a few "bumps in the road" since then, she says, it has made great strides in enforcement, technology and customer service.

The Border Patrol recently added 1,700 agents, she says, and there have been dramatic improvements in processing times for naturalization and other benefits.

Wyrsch says the agency prides itself on its employees' professionalism and impresses on all of them the importance of treating immigrants fairly and humanely.

"You need to treat people as if you were dealing with a member of your own family," she says.

In November, the INS published "A Record of Progress," a 19-page summation of achievements since 1993.

It lauds a current 25-year low in illegal entries along the California-Mexico border and hails a new national records center in Missouri that pools more than 25 million immigration files previously scattered at sites nationwide.

Among the INS' proudest achievements is a sharp increase in the deportation of criminals, which in fiscal 2000 hit 69,093 - more than doubling the number removed just five years earlier.

The agency also deported 112,479 non-criminals in the latest fiscal year, nearly seven times as many as the 17,082 it expelled in 1995. Those numbers were increased in large part by 1996 immigration reforms that contributed to many of the problems The Oregonian found.

Among other harsh measures, it made imprisonment mandatory for thousands of immigrants who formerly could have posted bond while their deportation cases were pending. Today, they're held indefinitely, sometimes for years.

Even some immigration officials now call it too harsh.

"A lot of these cases defy logic under the 1996 act," says Robert Eddy, the INS Anchorage district director.

"A lot of these aliens have U.S. citizen spouses and kids. They are pillars of the community or there is evidence of rehabilitation, yet the law mandates not only that they are deportable but that they be detained."

More than 20,000 men, women and children are in INS custody nationwide, in a helter-skelter network of federal prisons, private lockups and county jails - so many, and so far flung, that INS officials could not fully account for them in response to The Oregonian's Freedom of Information Act requests.

"It's like cold storage," says Allyson Collins, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, one of an array of religious and civil-rights groups that have sharply criticized the agency for its inattention to the care of people it detains.

"They treat people as things they have to store rather than treating them as people," she says.

Killing flies with a hammer

Among the harshest provisions of the 1996 law is one that allows the government to reach back in time, to use crimes that can be decades old and of a minor nature, as grounds for deportation.

It has had the effect of splitting families, contrary to some of the agency's public pronouncements decrying that notion.

Early this year, when Elian Gonzalez was sent to his father in Cuba in a custody case that focused international attention on the INS, then-Commissioner Meissner said the boy's return was the right thing to do.

"Both U.S. and international law recognize the unique relationship between parent and child," Meissner said, "and family reunification has long been a cornerstone of both immigration law and INS practice."

But the INS sometimes forces children to choose between parents when one is slated for deportation for something as minor as shoplifting.

Last month, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops called for an overhaul of the law because it has wrecked so many families, many with homes or businesses built upon years of law-abiding hard work.

If the law's intent was to protect the nation's borders, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of New Jersey says, its effect has been something else.

"We're not protecting anything," he says. "We're trying to kill flies with a hammer - and we're making a mess of it."

Even some of the law's architects are now backing away from its retroactive provisions, including Smith of Texas and U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla.

But while the 1996 law has figured heavily in some INS abuses and failures, it has little or nothing to do with others.

The Oregonian's investigation found an agency culture imbued with racism and riddled by misconduct.

In the Portland office, some supervisors and officers use ethnic slurs when referring to foreigners. In the Southwest, some Border Patrol agents use their authority to coerce sex from immigrants, while others stuff their pockets with drug-traffickers' cash - and then wave truckloads of marijuana into the country, unchecked.

Thwarted by protections for federal workers, INS managers who hand out miniature Statue of Liberty replicas to exemplary employees often are unable to discipline problem cases - even though one in seven of the agency's 32,000 employees was the subject of an internal investigation in 1999.

"It's hard to discipline people," says David Martin, a former INS general counsel, explaining that civil-service protections have "made the hurdles so high."

Low pay and heavy workloads dishearten some and cause others to berate co-workers and take a barroom bouncer's approach to foreigners, who have no constitutional protections - and few rights.

Out-of-touch agency

"They can do whatever they want," says William "Chip" Gehle, a Houston businessman.

His Mexican sister-in-law came for a family visit last year and wound up spending the night on a urine-soaked mattress in a locked room at the airport after INS officials accused her of trying to sneak into the country to work.

"They made me feel like trash," says Graciela Meza Rivera, 19, who was sent back to Mexico City on the next flight. "I don't think criminals are treated that way."

Many others who encounter the agency come away with the same negative feelings.

Some are victims of the agency's bungling, which results in the jailing and deportation of U.S. citizens and the loss or delay of benefits for immigrants.

Part of the problem is the decentralized nature of the agency, which is divided into 36 districts and 21 sectors and until recently stored its files at 80 sites around the country.

"There have always been enormous customer-service problems with the INS," says Don Kerwin, director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Washington, D.C. "You have all these little fiefdoms and everyone operating under their own rules."

The agency's leaders also are out of touch with the public's perception of the INS, says Jeff Young, president of the union local that represent INS employees in Vermont.

Young was shaking his head after visiting Florida for the INS commissioner's annual conference, which featured award ceremonies and a laudatory speech by Reno.

"You'd never know that we're the center of controversy, that virtually every bipartisan group in the country has lambasted us for what we've done or haven't done," he said.

"For four days, they live in never-never land," he said of top INS officials. "We were at Disney World. It was very appropriate."

Many of the agency's problems also stem from plain old all-American ineptitude, including lost files, sloppy record-keeping, computer problems and foul-ups of nearly epic proportions.

In 1998, the agency knew exactly where 30,000 citizenship files in New Jersey were but couldn't get to them - because they'd been contaminated by asbestos during a remodeling project. Some applications were delayed for more than a year because of it, but the INS did not bother to notify those affected.

Often even clergy and politicians are powerless before the INS.

Only an act of Congress can make the agency move when it doesn't want to, and sometimes even Congress can't help.

McCollum, the Florida representative who backed the 1996 law, earlier this year introduced a private bill to stop the deportation of the son of a political ally who was jailed because of one of its provisions - but then couldn't get it passed.

Sometimes the agency moves, but is so overwhelmed by its workload that people who seek its services wait for hours, only to be sent home when the office closes.

That happens so often in Rep. Schakowsky's Illinois district that eight of 10 calls from her constituents are complaints are about the INS.

They should be glad they're not trying to phone the INS instead, at least if the directory for the Portland district's detention and deportation units is any indication.

Of its 46 numbers, 43 bear a decidedly insular asterisk, meaning: "Unlisted telephone numbers, not for the public."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Julie Sullivan
Oregonian Staff

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service runs a rapidly growing but loosely monitored prison system that is ill-equipped to care for the more than 20,250 men, women and children it holds.

Many are criminals.

Many are not.

The INS jails convicted murderers released from other prisons, smugglers awaiting trial and undocumented workers nabbed in raids.

But it also jails children who arrive at airports with suspect passports, torture victims seeking asylum, immigrants put there for minor crimes committed decades ago - and U.S. citizens who shouldn't be there at all.

Jailed, too, are people such as Jose and Amalia Molina, Salvadoran immigrants who spent 16 months behind bars, separated from their children while the INS and the courts settled questions about their immigration status.

The INS parcels them all out to a decentralized and secretive network of lockups that - by virtue of legal mandate, ineptitude or sheer neglect - exposes them to sexual and physical abuse at the hands of other inmates or staff members.

No one in INS custody is serving a criminal sentence. But with no definite release date and restricted access to the outside world, it is as if they have been dropped into a black hole.

"We have fought wars against governments that made it their policy to put people in jail and not tell them when they'll get out, and not give them a jury trial," says Jay Stansell, Assistant Federal Public Defender from Seattle.

The Oregonian found that the INS:

• Farms out more than half the 20,250 people it jails daily to a haphazard network of 1,940 private state prisons and county jails including 250 facilities where it rents beds regularly.
• Doesn't reveal where those jails are.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists on its Web site every one of its 98 prisons, with addresses and contact telephone numbers.

The INS lists three of its nine service processing or detention centers. Only after two months and 33 Freedom of Information Act requests did the agency produce a list of its local jails.

• Cannot or will not fully account for who is being held, even when ordered by a court to do so.

The INS in January refused to provide a list of detainees eligible for release to the federal public defender in Portland, who discovered through a Catholic priest that dozens of detainees and asylum seekers were in Oregon jails. The INS bitterly fought a federal judge's May order to produce the list and when the agency did, it omitted some eligible detainees and misidentified others or their locations.

Two years ago, Congress ordered the INS to report how many detainees are asylum seekers and other demographic details. The agency still can't say.

• Shunts people from one jail to another, often without forwarding their mail, legal paperwork and personal possessions and without informing their attorneys or families.
• Has been unable to keep pace with its mushrooming detention population, which has tripled since 1995. Spending on detention and removal has ballooned from $367 million four years ago to $878.6 million next year.
• Holds people in jails under conditions considered severe even by prison standards. Detainees get no court-appointed lawyer, earn no reduced time for good behavior, often have no right to see a judge, can participate in no education and have no defined release date.
• Fails to protect people in INS custody from criminal inmates or staff.

In September, an officer at the Krome INS Detention Center outside Miami was charged with raping a transsexual asylum seeker who says she was raped in an isolation cell a second time after she reported the initial assault to three INS supervisors. One other officer resigned, another was suspended and eight others reassigned in a widening sex and bribery scandal under investigation.

Severe institutional problems

INS officials acknowledge problems in the agency's prison system, whose population has mushroomed largely because of 1996 immigration reforms.

The law made detention mandatory for deportees and others who previously could have been freed on bond while their cases played out.

It also allowed the government to deport people for far more crimes, even if committed years earlier.

While agreeing that the law was too harsh in some respects, INS officials say the detention policy is legal and necessary to the agency's mission of finding and deporting illegal immigrants and criminals.

Deportations have nearly tripled from 69,680 in 1996 to 181,572 this year, with the latest round including 69,093 convicted criminals. If not for detention, INS officials say, many would have vanished into the American landscape.

"If we can hold on to people, we can generally remove them," says Karen Kraushaar, an INS spokeswoman.

INS officials acknowledge that their rented jail system isn't perfect. Congress has poured money into the INS in recent years but has not funded construction of INS jails.

"We wanted our own facilities, and no one would give us the money to do it," said David Venturella, assistant deputy executive associate commissioner for detention and removal operations. He says little will change until the agency gets more of its own sites.

But, he says, the jails the INS uses are inspected by detention officers annually. Being the nation's gatekeeper also makes the INS a natural target.

"Anyone who slams the door in your face you're not going to like very much," Kraushaar says. "We don't shrink from our critics, and we don't shrink from our responsibility enforcing the law. Even if they hate us for it."

There is no shortage of critics.

International human rights groups say the U.S. detention system, especially for asylum-seekers, is one of the harshest in the developed world.

The nation's top immigrant charities have teamed with the American Bar Association, Human Rights Watch and more than 100 other religious, legal and social services organizations to form the Detention Watch Network, a watchdog group.

"The severity and institutional nature of the problems of the INS detention system cannot be refuted," says Don Kerwin, chief operating officer of Catholic Legal Immigration Network, after publishing a 2000 study of the INS detention system.

Thirteen federal courts around the country also have taken a dim view of the agency's prison system, ruling that the INS has more discretion to release people under the law than it uses. The INS insisted it was doing all it could.

But when federal judges appointed federal public defenders to represent people who could be released because they posed no flight risk or threat, more than 80 percent of those eligible in the Northwest were set free by the INS or by the court. Many, such as asylum seekers with no criminal history, had been held for years.

"The process was not working fairly at all. They were slow, incredibly rigid and harsh," said Federal Public Defender Steven Wax of Portland.

Meanwhile, Stansell and other Seattle federal public defenders are preparing to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court in coming months that the INS is illegally jailing people indefinitely who cannot be deported because their home countries, such as Vietnam or Cuba, will not take them back.

Two lower courts have already ruled against the agency on the same issue.

Debts led to detainment

Many behind bars on immigration matters have been there before, for criminal convictions.

But jail was a new experience for Jose and Amalia Molina, who spent 16 months in prison while the INS settled questions about their immigration status.

Their story is based on interviews with the Molinas and their children, their lawyer, court documents and witnesses to their experience.

The couple fled El Salvador, where Jose Molina's construction firm was targeted by leftist guerrillas because it held government contracts.

Jose's father survived being shot in the head. His brother and an employee were kidnapped and their projects bombed. Driven to near bankruptcy, the family took out several private high-interest loans to complete the jobs, but fled when Jose's life was threatened.

The Molinas entered the United States on business visas in 1995, moved into a garage in Los Angeles, eventually taking over a triplex where they could live in one unit, renting others. Jose's sister in Florida helped them take steps they thought would lead to permanent residency. The children entered school.

They got a lawyer and began paying their debts. But creditors, angry over the amounts they were paying, filed criminal charges against them in El Salvador.

Amalia Molina and her husband had no idea that warrants had been issued for their arrests.

She had just dropped two of her children at school at 7:30 a.m. March 18, 1998, when INS officers apprehended her in Los Angeles. She was in her pajamas.

Fifteen hours later, en route to an INS detention center on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor, she spotted her husband on the same bus with her. INS agents had rousted him from bed that morning.

Both were booked.

Choosing to stay and fight

For U.S. citizens, jail is punishment for a crime. For immigrants whose status is in question, it is one way of keeping them from fleeing.

Held in the same jails, the two groups have vastly different rights.

Only beginning in January under new nationwide INS jail standards will people in the agency's custody be guaranteed access to a telephone to call a lawyer.

Even at that, it took a four-year fight that went to Attorney General Janet Reno to get that minor privilege and 35 others: access to a law library and assurances they would not unnecessarily be strip-searched after meeting with a lawyer.

Many have the rights to present their stories to immigration judges, as the Molinas had.

But in 1996, Congress eliminated that step for thousands of people in INS detention whose crimes makes them deportable.

The INS acted legally when it took the Molinas into custody.

Based on international police-issued warrants and overstayed visas, the INS thought the Molinas might not appear for their immigration hearing, an INS spokeswoman said.

At San Pedro detention center on that March 1998 morning, they were issued the prison garb for criminals: red for him, blue for her.

Amalia Molina was locked up with 67 other women, Chinese, Sri Lankan, French, German, El Salvadoran, Mexican, young, old, criminals and non-criminals, many, she learned later, mothers.

Most INS detainees - by some estimates 90 percent - have no attorneys. The Molinas did. They asked for asylum, but lost based on the debt charges.

Their choice was to leave the country, or stay in jail and fight.

"I said, we will fight and fight and fight this," Amalia Molina says.

Call for greater discretion

With federal courts ruling that the INS' release policy was inadequate, the agency vowed in April 1999 to release those who weren't considered flight risks, and to conduct regular reviews.

But the agency's unwillingness to set people free infuriated one federal judge. "I am sick and tired of the INS," U.S. District Judge Owen Panner said Sept. 26 during a Portland hearing on a detention case.

"There has been no effort by the INS to get (detainees) out when they can, based on our experience."

Stansell, of the Seattle federal public defender's office, says that's an inherent problem with the system.

"That's the danger you get when you put an agency charged with locking people up, without a judge or jury involved, also in charge of deciding when the person is going to get out," he says.

But INS officials counter that their agency will be blamed as soon as someone who is released offends again.

"You're damned if you do and damned if you don't," said Charles DeMore, INS District Director in San Francisco and acting Portland district director.

On Nov. 17, in one of her last acts before resigning, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner ordered district directors and other INS officials nationwide to use more discretion in deciding who to place in deportation proceedings. She told them to consider factors including immigrants' length of residency in the U.S., family ties, and criminal histories.

Struggling to get by

Held in separate areas, Jose and Amalia Molina weren't allowed to write or speak to each other.

Amalia Molina, 46, a university-trained accountant, was exposed to tuberculosis and was in a fist fight. Her husband, 52, a U.S. trained architect, kept his coffee cup in a sock to defend himself from gang members

They earned $1 a day each cleaning bathrooms and cafeteria tables. Jose Molina wove small bags out of string for sale. Amalia Molina sold tiny ornaments she made from potato chip bags. Jose sold half his food. They earned $50 a week between them and sent it to their children.

That is $28 less than it costs the INS to detain one person for one day.

It is business that jails are happy to have. In Yamhill County Jail, 45 miles southwest of Portland, $690,000 a year in INS income is nearly half the amount spent to pay the officers who staff the jail.

"It's in the best interest of the Yamhill County taxpayers and us to have these folks here," Sheriff Norman Hand says of the detainees.

But critics say such county jails are meant to punish people - and only for short periods.

In October, federal public defenders asked Judge Panner to move or release all long-term detainees from the new regional jail in The Dalles, saying the stark conditions there were making one of the long-term detainees suicidal.

The jail, the Northern Oregon Regional Corrections Facility, allows no televisions or newspapers. There is no commissary, no bilingual officers and for most INS detainees, no work. Detainees were indoors 23 hours a day.

"It's a no-frills jail," agrees NORCOR Capt. Larry Lindhorst. "I wouldn't say jail is an enjoyable stay; I wouldn't want to be here either. But we try to make them comfortable when they're here, and we're still just getting going."

In court, the INS defended The Dalles' jail, which passed all state and INS inspections. But after the federal public defender in Portland complained in court, the INS immediately moved almost all long-term detainees to INS detention in Seattle.

In the INS detention center in Los Angeles, bilingual Amalia Molina filed asylum papers for a battered woman who spoke almost no English. She helped women who cried out at night with nightmares. They called her "Mother Teresa."

At times, the prison was so crowded that detainees could barely walk between beds. But the prison's detainees considered the alternative, a transfer to Nevada or Arizona, away from family and attorneys, far worse.

Transfers can be devastating

Acting INS Commissioner Mary Ann Wyrsch says the agency transfers detainees in order to get them closer to family and attorneys.

Dozens of lawyers and families interviewed disagree.

They say that the INS transfers detainees as punishment and to cut costs. In Oregon, veteran state jail inspector Dave Jester says that he never successfully investigated a jail complaint filed by an INS detainee because he or she was always transferred first.

Transfers can have grave consequences for detainees because their immigration cases often move with them.

Max Ogando, 28, a deaf native of the Dominican Republic, communicates only in Spanish sign language. He was taken into INS custody in New York after serving a one-year prison sentence for assault - a misdemeanor in New York, but an aggravated felony under immigration law. Ogando has a child in New York, a free immigration attorney and the only person in proceedings he clearly understood: a Spanish sign language interpreter.

But two days after the attorney took the case, Ogando was transferred to the Etowah County Jail in Alabama - and his case to an immigration court in Atlanta.

The Legal Aid Society of New York could not afford to send lawyer David Stern to Atlanta, and Ogando could not communicate for telephone proceedings. He appeared in court with no attorney and was ordered deported. He has appealed, and the case is pending.

"We move people around to where we have the space," says INS spokeswoman Amy Otten.

Injuries in custody

Jose Molina underwent an emergency appendectomy while being detained. His left leg was handcuffed to his bed and was broken in the process.

He was released from the hospital, unable to walk, and placed in a segregated cell with a mentally ill detainee. Court records show that such troubles are compounded by immigrants' inability to speak English.

According to a Yamhill County sheriff's report, on Aug. 31, 1999, jail officers discovered Tzu Li Chen with a towel around his neck and red marks on his skin.

The 32-year-old Chinese carpenter was upset and restrained by officers. He fainted and was put under medical supervision in segregation.

Criminal inmates standing nearby said they found Chen hanging from a towel rack, according to the report.

But papers filed in U.S. District Court a year later reveal that in an interview in Chinese with Paul K. Leung, associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University, Chen said he was not suicidal, but rather had been choked by another inmate.

He said he was the object of ridicule by jail inmates and unable to communicate with the people around him.

"Throughout the two-hour interview," Leung wrote, "he was frequently sobbing and on different occasions left his seat, kneeled down on the floor with the gesture to beg me to help him."

Chen, who is seeking asylum from China's forced sterilization policies, is still in INS custody in The Dalles while his case is pending.

Ten years ago in Florida, attorney Cheryl Little gathered 100 detailed affidavits and videotaped statements from staff members and detainees describing sexual abuse at Krome, the more than 500-bed detention center on the edge of the Everglades 25 miles from downtown Miami.

Her report garnered national headlines, an FBI investigation and little obvious change.

"We feel so helpless," she says, having learned that some of the INS officers implicated in abuse incidents this year also were identified in her report 10 years earlier. "How can this be happening in the United States of America?"

INS officials would not comment on Krome but said they expect to announce major changes at the Florida center Tuesday.

Family not bitter despite ordeal

Left at home alone, the three Molina teens quickly exhausted the family's $2,000 in savings. The bank repossessed the triplex and everything it contained.

Amy, then 16, and Jose, then 14, moved in with a family in exchange for baby-sitting and housework. Diana, then 19, who was starting community college, moved in with friends.

At 5 a.m. each Sunday, they drove to Terminal Island where their parents were held, then lined up for separate 15-minute visits with them.

Their attorneys traveled to El Salvador to clear the debt charges. After the criminal charges were dropped, the Molinas were released by the INS on July 26, 1999, on bonds of $1,500 each.

By then, everything they had was gone.

The family moved back in together into Diana's apartment with a donated couch and a bed Amy found on the street. In March, they were granted political asylum and began to rebuild their lives. Jose Molina recently got a commercial truck driver's license. His wife plans to sell real estate.

Amalia now visits other people's children in INS detention. Jose tried to visit his friends at the prison but was turned away. An officer told him he couldn't visit because he had been detained there.

Despite everything, the family is not bitter.

"The law is not perfect," Jose Molina says. "The INS is not perfect, but they will fix this. That's what I like about this great country - you can fix things here."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Julie Sullivan and Brent Walth

Oregonian Staff

"It used to be we had people who had done something bad in jail. Now we have people who are doing what our ancestors did: fleeing poverty and persecution, and we are locking them up."

In 1996, America clamped down on immigrants.

Jim Bunn watched it happen.

Now, he sees the effects in person.

Bunn rode the Republican wave into Congress in 1994, elected from Oregon's 5th congressional district. "We were saying, 'Let's do something; let's get tough on crime, on welfare and on illegal immigrants,'" he says.

Today Bunn works as a guard at Yamhill County Jail and watches immigrants sit in detention for months - even years - because of the laws enacted four years ago.

"I could not have anticipated how bad that bill was until people started showing up in jail," Bunn says.

In 1996, an estimated 4 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States with 300,000 more arriving each year. Three years earlier, the World Trade Center bombing raised Americans' fears about the nation's permeable borders. In 1994, Californians passed Proposition 187, curbing public services to illegal immigrants. It was later overturned by the courts.

After 40 years in the minority, GOP leaders promised real change in immigration law, citing polls that showed more than 70 percent of Americans wanted such reform.

Now, even some who championed the reforms say they went too far.

Aggressive intent

Former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, led the most aggressive changes to immigration laws in 20 years. They aimed to close the Mexican border, end abuse of political asylum, cut federal benefits for illegal immigrants and restrain the spiraling numbers of visas granted to families.

Smith and Simpson hoped to curb legal immigration, too. But the White House pressured Congress to instead focus on illegal immigration.

"Since the House and Senate failed to do anything with legal immigration, they got very restrictive, almost draconian with the illegal immigration," Simpson says.

Congress also backed away from getting tough with employers who hire illegal immigrants - even though a few years earlier a bipartisan committee had concluded that "reducing the employment magnet is the linchpin" of any strategy to curb illegal immigration.

Instead, Congress zeroed in on individuals.

Democrats and Republicans usually settle differences between the House and Senate in an official conference committee. With the immigration bill, Republicans met in September 1996 during weekend meetings in then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's office.

One provision - directing the INS to deport non-citizens with criminal records, no matter how old or small the offense - was a last-minute, surprise addition to the bill.

"It was outrageous," says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., a member of the subcommittee on immigration for 16 years. "They couldn't crack down on legal immigration; so they decided to make it as tough as possible for those already here."

President Clinton signed the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act which, combined with an anti-terrorism measure, boosted the size of the INS, now the biggest federal law-enforcement agency.

The reforms also:

• Barred illegal immigrants from re-entering the United States for as long as 10 years;
• Permitted people arriving without proper documents to be deported immediately;
• Lowered the threshold of deportable crimes to include offenses such as shoplifting and petty theft.

Overnight, the law made tens of thousands of people deportable and stripped their rights to have judges consider their cases.

While the INS agreed with Congress' attempt to more efficiently remove people who came illegally or visitors who committed crimes, the laws "can generate results that are too harsh and go too far," says Bo Cooper, INS general counsel.

Finding the brunt of the law

A conservative, Bunn voted against the immigration bill.

In Yamhill County Jail, he saw the new immigration law at work. He lost his seat in 1996 and became a corrections officer at the jail.

He found five Chinese asylum-seekers detained for weeks without anyone trying to learn whether they spoke Cantonese or Mandarin.

He met a young Oregonian being deported to Brazil, a country the young man hadn't seen since infancy and a language he had never spoken.

He met a successful Oregonian businessmen jailed for a drug conviction 20 years earlier.

He met a Sri Lankan fleeing to her family in Canada, jailed more than two years after the INS stopped her at the airport. She never smiled.

Bunn tracked down translators, Chinese and Russian bibles and dictionaries for the detainees. He wrote people who were deported. He told The New York Times and The Oregonian about his outrage over the Chinese asylum seekers' treatment. Then, Bunn came to work one day and learned the INS had transferred them.

"I am just appalled," Bunn says. "It used to be we had people who had done something bad in jail. Now we have people who are doing what our ancestors did: fleeing poverty and persecution, and we are locking them up."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Brent Walth and Kim Christensen

Oregonian Staff

Mario Nava and Gregorio Diaz have never met, but they have a lot in common.

Born in Illinois, Nava lives in California. Born in California, Diaz lives in Illinois. Both are U.S. citizens. Both lived in Mexico for most of their lives before returning to the United States.

And both say they are victims of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's bungling.

Nava landed in jail when INS officials insisted he was someone else -- a foreigner -- and then let him languish for six weeks until a Catholic nun came to his rescue. INS officials didn't believe Diaz either but didn't bother with jail. He says they denied him the right to see a judge and packed him off to Mexico within hours of stopping him at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

The incidents were traumatic for Nava and Diaz -- but they are just two more examples of the frequent flubs that have defined the INS, an agency that members of Congress, audits, investigations and studies point to as one of the most inept and troublesome in the federal government.

"The INS stands alone -- there is no one like it," says Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., who in his 18 years on the House Appropriations Committee has overseen several major federal departments and scores of smaller agencies. "It's (continously) in trouble and causing problems and headaches and mishaps."

"Broken beyond fixing"

The litany of INS blunders might be comic if so many didn't have such tragic consequences.

• A U.S. Department of Justice investigation last year found that INS agents released a suspected serial killer in part because agents didn't know how to run their own fingerprint database. The suspect went on to kill four more people.
• Millions of people have waited for years while the INS processes applications for citizenship or other benefits on computers running mid-1980s software. With 25 million case files in storage, the INS misplaces tens of thousands of files each year -- 80,000 in 1998 alone -- and leaves immigrants to resubmit applications and pay fees all over again.
• The INS tried to snatch newly minted citizenship from about 5,000 people before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this summer declared the agency's actions illegal. Immigrants spent a small fortune in legal fees fighting this and other INS lapses.

Acting INS Commissioner Mary Ann Wyrsch says her agency has scored many successes in recent years, including setting a record-breaking rate for approving new citizenship applications and reducing a towering backlog. She adds that her agency makes relatively few errors while dealing with millions of people every year.

"We make mistakes, just like anybody else," Wyrsch says. "I do not think that they are widespread. . . . I don't defend them, but I think it's important to look at the total workload that goes on every day which is done well, courteously and in a quality manner."

Without a doubt, the INS faces a daunting task. Part of the Justice Department, the INS must protect the United States' 6,000 miles of borders, control illegal immigration and round up deportable immigrants, including criminals.

This year, the INS deported about 181,000 would-be immigrants trying to enter illegally through U.S. ports, stopped another 1.6 million trying to cross the Mexican border, but barely dented the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States -- estimated at 5 million.

The agency also approves services to immigrants, such as citizenship applications, work permits and green cards, which designate legal residence. The INS handles about 5 million annually -- with a surge in recent years.

"We had systems for doing things that for years seemed to work all right," says William R. Yates, director of the INS immigrant services division. "But when the application numbers just skyrocketed, some of those systems just collapsed."

The problem isn't that the agency lacks money. Congress has aimed a fire hose of cash at the agency, pumping its annual budget up to $4.3 billion, tripling the amount it received in 1994, while most federal agencies have seen little or no increases.

The result? The Government Performance Project, an independent review of public agencies run by Syracuse University, awarded the INS a C-minus the past two years -- making it dead last among the 20 federal agencies studied.

"We finally have to admit this agency is broken beyond fixing," Rogers says. Both Democrats and Republicans are angry. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees INS operations, puts it simply: "The INS is the agency from hell."

Agency releases criminals

In 1996, Congress passed tough immigration laws that led to more arrests and deportations. As a result, the law exploded the number of INS detainees three-fold, to more than 20,000 since 1996.

Last year, the INS deported 69,312 criminals. The agency acknowledged to Congress this year that in the past five years it had released 35,319 criminals -- and that about one-third committed new crimes, ranging from petty theft to murder.

Then-INS Commissioner Doris Meissner told a congressional committee in March that crimes committed by the INS' released detainees were "of great concern." INS officials say many of the releases were ordered by judges while others -- the agency doesn't say how many -- were released under INS' discretion.

In June 1999, an employee checking the agency's criminal database realized the INS had only days earlier arrested and released Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a suspect in four killings in Texas and Kentucky.

Local and state police had asked the INS to look out for Resendez-Ramirez, known as the "railway killer," a Mexican national the INS had previously detained and deported.

After being released from INS custody, Resendez-Ramirez killed four more people, a Department of Justice inspector general's investigation later found.

The investigation also found that INS officials failed to flag Resendez-Ramirez in their fingerprint database after they learned he was wanted for murder. He surrendered in July 1999 and was later sentenced to death in Texas.

The investigation concluded that many INS officials had "a disturbing lack of knowledge" about the agency's own database, even though the agency had recently issued a training memo.

So what happened to the training memo?

"Most investigators," the report said, "either discarded it without reviewing it or reviewed it but did not understand the contents and made little or no effort to do so."

Even citizens mistreated

While criminals slip through the INS' hands, the agency sometimes jails innocent U.S. citizens.

Mario Nava, born in 1974 in Chicago and thus a U.S. citizen, lived in Mexico after his parents went back to the country when he was 3. He returned to the United States in 1999 to find a job and had hopes of sending for his wife and son. When he traveled between the countries, he carried documents to prove his citizenship.

On Feb. 19, he flew from Mexico City to Los Angeles International Airport, where he could not convince INS agents of his identity and citizenship.

"They keep saying I am not that person," Nava, who does not speak English, says through an interpreter.

"They give me a piece of blank paper and tell me to write my name on it. I keep on writing 'Mario Nava' and they say, 'No, you don't tell the truth. You're going to jail for 20 years.' "

An INS transcript of Nava's airport interview corroborates key portions of his account.

The INS jailed him for 45 days. He might still be there if not for Sister Sharlet Wagner, a Catholic nun and attorney with the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. As Wagner made her weekly legal-rights presentation to INS detainees in a federal lockup in Lancaster, Calif., Nava raised his hand.

"He said, 'I'm a U.S. citizen,' " Wagner recalls.

INS agents working at the nation's airports often see document fraud, and Wagner said INS inspectors had reason to suspect her client because he speaks little English and a computer check showed his Social Security number had been issued twice.

But the nun says the INS made no attempt to verify Nava's identity. Finally, on April 3, Immigration Judge Robert O. Vicars ruled Nava's citizenship valid and ordered him released.

"They took a U.S. citizen and locked him up for 45 days without any follow-up or investigation to determine whether he was a citizen," Wagner says. "It's unjustifiable."

These days, Nava works at a Santa Ana, Calif., market, sending money to his wife and son in Mexico. "I miss my family, but I have not gone back," Nava says. "I am afraid to go to Mexico because when I come back here something might happen to me again."

At least Nava saw a judge. Gregorio Diaz says he didn't have the chance.

Also born in the United States, Diaz, 21, moved from Zacatecas, Mexico, to the Chicago area in 1997. He moved in with family and landed a kitchen job at a country club. Federal court records and interviews with Diaz and his family describe what happened next.

When Diaz returned on Feb. 17, 1998, from visiting his parents in Mexico, INS agents stopped him at O'Hare. Diaz showed them his California birth certificate. As with Nava, Diaz spoke little English.

"They immediately told me I was not Gregorio Diaz," says Diaz through an interpreter. "They told me I stole the documents. . . . They told me I was going back to Mexico right away."

INS records show agents believed Diaz contradicted his claim to U.S. citizenship. Diaz says he never wavered in his account.

INS rules require that anyone who claims to be a U.S. citizen see an immigration judge before the INS can deport him or her. But Diaz says he never got a chance to see a judge. He says INS officials strip-searched him, interrogated him for several hours and sent him back on the next plane.

Diaz re-entered the United States two weeks later after lawyers protested and a local television station took interest.

He had to sue the INS to get back his identification papers, which the INS later concluded were authentic.

The agency declines to comment on the Nava and Diaz cases. "I think if you go looking for those things you will find them," Wyrsch says, while not commenting on those specific cases. "Something could happen tomorrow that none of us will be proud of. I think that those are not patterns. They are not norms. They are aberrations."

Diaz is suing for $2 million in damages. "The INS made me feel like I was nothing," he says.

Mission of conflict

The vast majority of immigrants come into contact with the INS while seeking services or benefits, such as citizenship.

Many say this dual role for the INS -- on one hand helping immigrants, and on the other enforcing laws against them -- has shortchanged the agency's service role.

Witnesses in congressional hearings last year reported applicants showing up at 2 a.m. at the Los Angeles INS office to guarantee being served that day.

In another hearing in 1999, an aide to Rep. Phil Crane, R-Ill., told of a letter Crane had sent the Chicago INS asking about a constituent's citizenship application. The INS wrote back to say Crane's citizenship application had been denied.

Losing files is a "chronic problem," as INS Commissioner Meissner conceded in a congressional hearing last year. INS officials admitted to Congress that the agency had lost 80,000 files in 1998 alone -- and those were just the ones they knew about.

In an INS service center in Burlington, Vt., crates of files teeter along the walkways between overstuffed cubicles. Even with new computers, the center relies on time-tested filing techniques.

"I don't know what we'd do without hand trucks and milk crates," says Paul E. Novak Jr., director of the INS' Vermont Service Center.

The INS recently opened a national records center in Missouri to handle its 25 million case files.

Still, Novak says the agency struggles. "A lot of resources in the last four to five years have gone to the enforcement side of INS, not the benefits," Novak says.

"It's frustrating for me. It's frustrating for the customers. It's heart-breaking, in some cases."

"God would be more accessible"

In New Jersey in 1998, INS officials stored 30,000 files in a storage room where workers later found asbestos. A crew had to seal off the room -- but the INS didn't bother to notify the applicants.

In the marooned files sat the citizenship application of Hiep Tran. He had fled Vietnam in 1988 in a leaky wooden boat and applied for citizenship on July 4, 1997.

"I just waited and waited and waited," says Hiep, 22, a biology major at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

A year later, the INS told Hiep his file sat in the sealed storage area, untouchable until workers could decontaminate the files. Hiep waited two more years for citizenship. Hiep's foster mother, Addie Guerin, also became frustrated while helping deal with the INS.

"When you call it's like trying to get God on the phone," Guerin says. She pauses, and then adds, "God would be more accessible than the INS."

Still, after huge budget increases for their agency from Congress, INS officials say they can now point to big improvements in service for people seeking citizenship.

The INS' Yates says the agency has processed 2.5 million citizenship applications since 1998 and has cut average wait times from two years or more to about six months. To do it, Yates says, the INS solved long-standing problems with the quality of the agency's work. He also says the once-mistake-ridden review process now runs 99 percent error-free.

In the past, he says, the INS had to redo the required fingerprinting for citizenship applicants in about one-third of the cases because INS workers didn't collect the fingerprints properly.

He says better attention to detail and improved fingerprint technology have nearly eliminated inaccuracies.

But when the INS switched to a new computer system in 1998 to handle citizenship cases, about 400,000 people were inadvertently dropped from the computer records. INS officials didn't notice the problem until complaints about long delays flooded in all over the country from immigrants, attorneys and social service agencies.

The INS labeled the cases "system bombouts" and has scrambled to find and finish the lost cases, some dating to 1996.

Meanwhile, thousands of newly naturalized U.S. citizens spent years fighting the INS' efforts to revoke their citizenship, thanks in part to INS sloppiness. In 1995 and 1996 the INS rushed through 1 million naturalization cases, many through a program called Citizenship USA.

But in its haste, the INS failed to perform required background checks on 170,000 applicants, congressional testimony shows.

Republicans, accusing the Clinton administration of trying to rush new citizens in to vote during an election year, chastised the agency. Under intense political pressure from Congress, the INS launched a massive citizenship revocation.

At least 5,000 new citizens received INS letters telling them their citizenship would be taken away because of application errors.

In most cases, applicants had not mentioned previous arrests -- admissions that would not necessarily disqualify them for citizenship.

Javier Sanguino, born in Mexico and now living in Aloha, received one of the letters. Sanguino became a citizen in January 1996 -- "one of the proudest moments of my life," he says.

But on his citizenship application, Sanguino, who runs his own paint contracting business, failed to mention two Umatilla County arrests -- one in 1983 for reckless driving and one in 1984 for driving under the influence of alcohol. He paid a $150 fine for the reckless driving violation. Police dropped the DUII charge when Sanguino entered a diversion program.

Sanguino admits he did not disclose the arrest, but says he thought the form's question asked about criminal activity. He didn't think a DUII arrest and a traffic violation counted.

Had the INS performed the required checks, the discrepancy could have been cleared up. Instead, Sanguino spent $3,000 on attorney fees to protect his new citizenship.

"I believed I answered the form's questions accurately," he says. "I spent all day wondering why this could be happening to me."

Sanguino also joined a class-action lawsuit. He and thousands of others prevailed in July, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the INS to stop illegally revoking citizenship.

By law, the INS can issue citizenship, but only a judge can take it away. In a unanimous opinion, the appeals court ruled the INS had improperly tried to give itself the power to revoke citizenship that Congress had never given it.

The court even poked fun at the agency's claims it could grant itself such power by quoting from the musical "Porgy and Bess":

"It ain't necessarily so."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Julie Sullivan

Oregonian Staff

Sometimes not even Congress can help.

When Romanians Veronica and Julian Mart won the 1999 visa lottery, they thought they had won an 8-year fight to stay in the United States.

It made them eligible to apply for the 55,000 permanent visas chosen from 8 million applicants worldwide -- if they applied quickly, which they did.

Then the Portland office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied their application. Rep. Darlene Hooley, D-Ore., took the Salem family's case to the Oregon congressional delegation, to the INS district director and finally last July, to the House floor. She introduced a bill granting the Marts and their two children permanent residency. She hand-carried the case to Doris Meissner, then INS commissioner.

Meissner promised a review. Six weeks ago, the INS said it had made a mistake. The Marts were eligible for a visa -- but all the visas were gone, awarded to other people.

"There is no good fix," says acting District Director Charles DeMore, whose review acknowledged the mistake. "All I can say is we're very sorry. We have no legal means" to give them a visa.

Across the country, the powerful as well as the powerless run into the brick wall of the INS. Members of Congress, federal judges, mayors, clergy and community leaders have on many occasions tried, without avail, to move the agency -- often on cases that much later even the INS agreed were valid.

Veronica Mart, 39, and her husband, Julian, 42, came to the United States in 1991 as visitors and applied for political asylum. Their application was denied. They pursued work permits and, over the yeras, the visa lottery.

Portland INS denied their application, saying that Veronica Mart had earlier overstayed her 1991 visa. The couple took the case to court, where U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Jones showed frustration at his inability to override the INS.

"I don't have the legal authority to right what I perceive to be a wrong," the judge said. The Marts then argued a different point of law, and Jones agreed to review the case. It is now pending.

In July, 11 friends of the Marts' children took a petition with 1,000 signatures to Hooley, who wanted the private bill to pass to prove that "government works."

"This was the most egregious case I've seen," Hooley says. The Marts and their children, Paul, 10, and Adelina, 14, remain in Salem only because of Veronica's temporary work permit through her employer, Mitsubishi Silicon America.

Paul Mart has not been able to work since he lost his work visa when his company closed two years ago. DeMore said he could help Paul, an engineer, secure a work permit, but little else. He suggested they try the lottery again, and possibly another private relief bill to Congress.

Pushed by elected leaders

In Columbus, Ga., Mayor Bobby Peters has written letters and gone to immigration court asking that local businessman Jong Ik Lee be released from the DeKalb County Jail in Decatur, Ga.

Lee did wrong, the mayor says. He sold counterfeit goods such as knock-off handbags. But he pleaded guilty, surrendered $500,000 to the government, worked with agents for several months to nab others and served a year in federal prison.

Now, Lee has severe heart problems and has been ordered deported to South Korea. He has a wife and two children, all citizens, and petitions for his release signed by 7,000 supporters. He's been in the county jail since February.

"He's paid his debt, but it's not enough," Peters says of the INS' perspective.

Congress introduced more than 70 private immigration laws this session. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., tried to prevent a political ally's son from being deported under the 1996 law he helped craft. Rep. David Wu, D-Ore, introduced three bills on behalf of three Chinese boys held in Multnomah County's Donald E. Long juvenile jail for more than eight months.

The bills, along with the Marts bill, vanished in committee.

But 17 of the bills became law. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., got a law granting permanent residency for Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese activist who spent 29 years in Chinese prisons for his pro-democracy stance. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, got a bill for a British woman who also won the visa lottery but lost her bid because of a lost file at the National Visa Center. A bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., allowed a young disabled Russian and his mother, both longtime Portland residents, to gain permanent residency to continue treatment at Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Public scrutiny also appears to help move the INS.

Amid critical news reports, the INS helped return the German wife of a U.S. citizen to Oregon after it separated her from her breast-feeding daughter and deported her three months earlier. A Portland immigration official granted permanent residency to a pregnant Beaverton woman who had waged three years of appeals by lawyers, Mormon church leaders and the California congressional delegation.

"I used to lay awake at night and think, 'Have I studied enough case law? Have I read enough books?' " says Alicia Triche, a lawyer with Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Los Angeles. "Now, I go to sleep and think, 'Have I called enough reporters?' "

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Brent Walth, Kim Christensen and Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

In the final two years of an otherwise spotless career, Sally Yates ripped off the Immigration and Naturalization Service for $39,040.

Yates, who worked in the INS Portland District office, found the agency an easy mark.

So have hundreds of other crooked INS employees around the country, making it one of the federal government's most corrupt law-enforcement agencies, according to records and interviews.

In the past three years, the Department of Justice's inspector general has investigated more than twice as many INS employees as it has those of the comparably sized Bureau of Prisons. The same ratio applied to the agencies in terms of arrests for criminal misconduct, including fraud and bribery.

The INS and the inspector general's office launched a record 4,551 internal investigations last year -- one per seven workers in an agency that employs 32,000. That compares with one per 31 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms employees and one per 89 Secret Service employees.

INS officials dispute such comparisons and say the numbers are not out of whack, given the agency's size and the huge volume of people it deals with each year.

Yet, former Inspector General Michael Bromwich says the INS consistently outdid the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Prisons and the Marshals Service in terms of criminal activity.

"When I first became inspector general, I was astounded at the percentage of the criminal investigations caseload comprised of INS matters," says Bromwich, who held the job from 1994 to 1999. "That level changed very little over the five years I was there."

Since 1998, at least 294 INS employees -- including inspectors, agents and high-ranking officials -- have been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from immigrant-smuggling to sexual assault, bribery, extortion and drug trafficking, Department of Justice records show.

About 25 percent of the cases ended in guilty pleas or convictions. Others resulted in terminations or other disciplinary actions.

Thomas J. "T.J." Bondurant, the Justice Department's assistant inspector general for investigations, says it is not the number of crimes but their nature that disturbs him. "It's shocking, some of the cases we have made," says Bondurant, who is responsible for investigating INS wrongdoing and oversees 145 investigators in 17 offices.

"If not a scandal, it's embarrassing to us all -- and it should be embarrassing to us all. These are people that the government has put in a position of trust."

Smugglers, rapists and murderers

Those who have violated that trust include Jesse Gardona, who was a 15-year INS veteran. While a member of the Los Angeles anti-smuggling unit, in 1998 Gardona arranged to move about 10 undocumented immigrants from INS detention to an East Los Angeles drop house, where they were ransomed to relatives for as much as $1,800 apiece.

Gardona, 40, who split the money with an alleged drug dealer, faces as much as five years in prison after pleading guilty in September "to the very crime he was responsible for investigating as an INS agent," says Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.

Federal court records and the files of the Department of Justice's inspector general reveal cases spanning the country:

• Inspector Juan H. Villarreal, 34, was convicted in December 1998 of bribe-taking and rape by violating the federal civil rights of an illegal immigrant from Mexico in a Laredo, Texas, motel after he threatened to deport her if she didn't have sex with him.
• INS inspector Richard Lawrence Pineda, 42, was convicted in April of smuggling illegal immigrants and 3,500 pounds of marijuana through the San Ysidro, Calif., port of entry.
• John T. Shandorf, 33, supervisor at the INS' asylum office in Queens, N.Y., was convicted in May of taking $50,000 in bribes to approve 14 asylum applications.
• Kenneth L. Stewart, 35, a San Diego border patrol agent, was convicted this year of witness tampering after he covered up his assault of a suspect.

In Portland, Yates, 53, was a 26-year INS veteran in charge of four employees who handled paperwork, fees and immigration requests at the Portland District headquarters when she embezzled immigrants' application fees to feed a gambling habit. Court records show she covered her thefts by claiming paperwork was lost and then issuing temporary benefits.

"Her actions really slowed legitimate applications," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Stuckey, who prosecuted the case, although no eligible immigrant was denied benefits.

Yates pleaded guilty to one count of theft of government funds. At her sentencing in May 1999, she told U.S. District Judge Ancer Haggerty she was sorry.

"I never intended to hurt anybody," she said. "I always thought I was going to repay the money."

Haggerty sentenced Yates to a year in prison and ordered her to repay $39,040, which she paid out of her retirement money.

Internal controls weak

At least five times before Yates stole from the Portland INS, federal auditors and General Accounting Office investigators reported flaws in the handling of cash receipts at INS offices nationwide.

Applications and fees were not reconciled, mail rooms not secured, cash deposits not safeguarded.

In Chicago, an INS cashier embezzled $134,000 in cash held as security for immigration bonds. In McAllen, Texas, a detention officer made off with $12,000 in cash. And at an unnamed INS office, someone rifled the safe to the tune of $54,000.

"The District and Port collection process has weaknesses in internal controls that place collections at high risk of being misused, diverted or stolen," General Accounting Office auditors reported in October 1995.

But as recently as this year, The Oregonian found problems still begging to be fixed.

In a March report to Congress, the Justice Department's inspector general said $17 million in fee collections at INS ports of entry on the Southwest border were "highly vulnerable" to loss or theft.

Auditors noted that many of the same flaws turned up in a 1995 report, but went "uncorrected despite assurances from INS management that action would be taken."

Bromwich, the former Justice Department inspector general, says it's not the only time the agency has been slow to react.

"To reduce misconduct, the agency has to make it clear that it will not stand for it," he says. "You can't tell your personnel that you will get tough with them, fail to get tough with them and not have them notice the difference between your message and your actions."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Kim Christensen, Julie Sullivan and Brent Walth

Oregonian Staff

Luis Gonzalez was forced to leave the country when his son was eight weeks old, and didn't get home until his child was a walking, talking toddler of 3.

Antonio Hernandez has spent the past five months alone in Alaska, while his wife and kids are marooned in Mexico.

Rene Hamilton is 13 and faces the prospect of having to choose between his parents.

All are casualties of immigration law and policies that have torn apart families and blasted away at bedrock principles of the United States' treatment of newcomers.

"There's a whole bunch of people suffering," says Rene's father, Thomas Hamilton, 47, who fled Cuba 20 years ago and now stands to lose his wife and son. "Something is terribly wrong."

Family unity traditionally has been the foundation for U.S. immigration policy, which has welcomed spouses, children and parents of American citizens by granting them protected status in securing citizenship and other benefits.

But many now are locked up without due process of law or have been booted out of the country without so much as a hearing, breaking up families nationwide.

Some are the product of unyielding enforcement tactics, such as earlier this year when Asian travelers were being rejected by the dozens in Portland, and later the German wife of a U.S. citizen was deported without her nursing infant.

Others are victims of bureaucratic bungling, among them the Hernandezes, who were separated because U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials failed to print an e-mail and put it in Gloria Hernandez's file.

Still other family breakups result from 1996 immigration reforms that, among other things, eliminated due-process rights and barred many immigrants from the United States for 10 years because of problems they formerly could have fixed for a fee.

Proponents of the law say it has enabled the INS to help rid the country of dangerous criminals, this year nearly doubling the 36,000 deported in 1996.

In some cases, however, the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime.

Shrine for a detained dad

William Then is bracing for his third straight Christmas behind bars and the prospect of being deported to the Dominican Republic, a country he left at age 1.

He is locked up near Seattle because he stole a VCR and $98 worth of tools -- misdemeanors in his home state of Alaska, but deportable crimes in the eyes of immigration law.

Then, 37, had just finished serving 53 days in halfway houses for the thefts when the INS picked him up two years ago.

Before the 1996 law change, he could have been freed on bond while fighting deportation. Now he must sit in jail until his case is decided, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $20,000 a year.

His two daughters and their mother, Lisa Rupp, are nearly 1,500 miles away in Anchorage, living on welfare because she is disabled and depended on his auto mechanic's pay for support.

"This has had a horrible effect on the family," says Rupp, who has been with Then for 12 years and is the mother of Liza, 10, and Scarlet, 11.

"My kids are heartbroken, especially the little one. She's constantly asking about her dad. She's literally built a shrine for him, with pictures and whatnot."

A 1999 study by the non-partisan Urban Institute found that 10 percent of all U.S. families with children had at least one non-citizen parent and could be affected by the law and policies that have stepped up deportations.

Citizens and Immigrants for Equal Justice, a Texas-based coalition of families facing long-term separation because of the 1996 law, represents 725 families in 27 states.

But Laurie Kozuba, the group's founder, says the numbers understate the problem.

"Those are just the families we know about, the ones who have had the courage to come forward," she says. "Our numbers would be higher, except that many families have already been torn apart and deported."

Oregon to Cuba to Guatemala

Thomas Hamilton hopes his family will not suffer the fate that has torn apart so many others.

Born Rene Chirino Delgado, the Cuba native adopted a new name to go with his new life in America after arriving in the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

By this summer he was married with a son, had a mortgage on an Aloha split-level, a 10-year-old Oregon business and $384,000 in wiring-work contracts waiting to be signed.

In July, the INS invited him to the Portland office, supposedly to discuss his application for permanent residency.

He stopped on his way to a job -- and got blind-sided. He was arrested, handcuffed and taken in shackles to the Yamhill County Jail in McMinnville.

"Don't play with me like this," said his disbelieving wife, Gloria, 38, when he called her.

It was no joke. Hamilton was targeted for deportation because of a 17-year-old conviction for the possession and sale of a small amount of cocaine, for which he had served three months in California.

The INS didn't try to deport him when he left prison in 1983, when he applied for permanent residency in 1985 or when he renewed his work permit every year since.

But after 1996, the law allowed drug offenses and other criminal convictions to be considered retroactively. The provision took him by surprise, as it had many members of Congress who voted for it unaware that House Republicans had slipped it into the bill in a last-minute, closed-door session.

The law also did away with judicial review in cases such as Hamilton's, eliminating his chance to present mitigating factors to an immigration judge. It no longer mattered that he was a successful businessman, youth soccer coach, neighborhood handyman and law-abiding resident for the past 17 years.

This summer in McMinnville, he was in plastic jail slippers for 52 days.

"I'm a grown man," he says. "I could stand anything. But this was so shameful."

Hamilton's neighbors and business associates rallied with letters of support as his attorney, Samuel Asbury, petitioned for his release.

Asbury got his client before an immigration judge by arguing that he'd been jailed in Cuba for his dissident political views and would be tortured if sent back. Eventually, the judge deferred Hamilton's deportation, which freed him from custody but didn't rule out his removal in the future.

He was released Sept. 7, only to find the INS preparing to deport his wife to Guatemala.

She had entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1989 and thought her husband's legal status as a Cuban refugee -- and her model-citizen life -- protected her from deportation. It would have, until the 1996 law eliminated consideration of such factors as grounds for relief.

For their son, Rene, the prospect of either parent being deported is nothing short of a nightmare.

"He is 13 and will be forced to choose between countries and between his parents," family attorney Nicole Nelson says.

If his mother is deported to Guatemala, his father will not be able to go with her because that country, like most others, will not accept people with drug convictions.

At a hearing in October, Immigration Judge Michael Bennett noted Hamilton's 17 years as a law-abiding resident and pressed INS lawyer Michael Spargo on the potential harm to the seventh-grader, a U.S. citizen born in California.

"You're asking me to order his mother to Guatemala, where his father can't go. Isn't the result almost certainly the break-up of the family?"

Spargo wouldn't entertain the notion.

"Your honor," he said, "it's not in the record and I would rather not indulge in hypotheticals."

Bennett chided him and the INS for its "corporate mentality" in dealing too harshly with families.

"We are making a decision that will almost certainly affect the life of this American boy and we should make every effort to see what that effect will be," he said, "even if you are the INS."

On Thursday Bennett will decide whether to cancel Gloria Hamilton's deportation because of potential hardship for Rene.

"This is the American dream," his father says, reflecting on the family's ordeal. "We work hard, we live in peace. I never expected this would happen to us."

"Incredible damage" ahead

Bogusia Ramsey also was living the American dream, as she spent the past 11 years building a new life in Temecula, Calif., after immigrating from Poland.

She and her husband, Steve, a U.S. citizen who is a public transit bus driver, have a 10-year-old daughter. She also has a 24-year-old Polish-born son who is mentally ill and faces deportation.

She probably will have to choose between the two, with one certain result: Her family will be ripped apart.

"Everything we have will be gone," says Ramsey, 48, a naturalized citizen.

Her son, Jacek Toposzkiewicz, faces deportation because of two 1997 petty theft charges -- a joyride in a car and a shoplifting -- that his doctor and his mother think were triggered by his schizophrenia.

"He did this because he is ill," she says.

In a written report, Dr. A. R. Dia, a Riverside County, Calif., Mental Health Department psychiatrist, concluded last year that Toposzkiewicz's schizophrenia could have caused him to commit the thefts, that he needs therapy and medication and that both he and his mother will suffer if he's deported.

The immigration judge never saw Dia's letter. Nor could he weigh Toposzkiewicz's illness.

Judges can't consider disabilities, says Susan Eastwood, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the judicial branch of the immigration service.

"Judges can only give what the law allows them to give," she says.

Toposzkiewicz became deportable because of a provision of the 1996 law that automatically targets anyone convicted of "crimes of moral turpitude" within seven years of coming to the United States. He was admitted to the country in September 1991, convicted in February 1997 and is free on bond pending an appeal.

"I wish to stay here in America," he says.

His best hope is to convince a judge that his deportation will cause extreme hardship for his family, a long shot at best even by the estimation of his mother and lawyer.

"We are preparing for incredible damage," she says, worried that he will not get treatment in Poland.

If he goes, she will go with him. Her husband and daughter will not.

"My daughter is only 10 years old and is born here in America and doesn't want to go," she says. "But I am my son's mother and the only person who takes care of him. How do I let him go without me?

"How do I choose?"

Bureaucratic delays

Earlier this year, so many travelers were rejected by immigration officers at Portland International Airport that the city was dubbed "Deportland."

The same brand of strict enforcement, aggravated by bureaucratic missteps, has cost Antonio Hernandez the companionship of his wife and children since June.

"We have been married 13 years and were never separated before," says the 53-year-old cannery worker in Kodiak, Alaska. "I told them my wife should not be sent out of the country, but they sent her out anyway."

Hernandez came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant and applied for legalization under a 1986 amnesty program. Several years later, the INS rejected his application, contending he had not submitted the proper records. The agency eventually reopened his case, however, when he proved he had sent them by certified mail.

In the meantime, the INS moved to deport his wife, Gloria.

She also entered the country illegally, but because her husband's case had been mishandled, and because she'd be permitted to stay if he was legalized, an INS official decided to halt her deportation.

"Would you please review this case and assure that we do not enforce this lady's departure until the other matter is resolved?" Anchorage District Director Robert Eddy wrote in a January 1998 e-mail to a subordinate.

But because no one put a copy of the e-mail into her paper file, other INS officials proceeded with her deportation.

"They broke up this family," says the Rev. Fred Bugarin, pastor of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Kodiak. "It was really heartbreaking."

The children -- ages 6 to 10 -- are U.S. citizens and could have stayed with their father. But day care is scarce on the remote island, and he decided he could not keep them and his job.

By the time the INS recognized its mistake, Antonio's family had been packed off to Guadalajara.

"I feel kind of bad that we made a promise to Gloria Hernandez and didn't fulfill that promise," Eddy says. Until Antonio's case is decided, however, his family is stuck in Guadalajara.

"Only God knows what will happen," Hernandez says. "All I can do is sit and wait."

Changing laws confusing

In the past five years, the seesawing of immigration law has also turned some hapless people into illegal immigrants overnight.

In 1994, Congress made fixing technical problems with immigrants' residency status much easier.

Rather than having to leave the country for years while the INS processed the paperwork as before, they could pay a $1,000 fee to the agency. Thus, those who were otherwise eligible for permanent residency could remain stateside while fixing their status.

Two years later, Congress not only took away that option, but also created a whole new punishment. Because of the 1996 law, people needing to adjust status not only have to depart the United States, but are banned for three to 10 years to boot.

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., led the fight to repeal the 1994 provision, known as 245(I). In House floor debate in 1996, he said the provision let immigration cheats stay in the United States while honest people seeking admission had to wait for entry.

"This loophole rewards people who have flagrantly violated our laws, people who are here illegally, and also puts our country at a security risk," Rohrabacher says.

But many people hurt by the change pose no apparent risk.

In September, The Oregonian told the story of Claudia Young, a German married to a U.S. citizen and living near Roseburg with their infant daughter. Young, who arrived in February 1999, admitted she overstayed her 90-day visa but was told by INS agents that she could apply for renewal.

That was true before Congress changed the law, but not in July when she went to the INS Portland office. Officers arrested her, separated her from her breast-feeding baby and sent her back to Germany.

Barred from returning for 10 years, she was allowed back into the country in October, but only after Portland INS and District Director David Beebe were pelted by public criticism.

Others have not fared as well as Young.

In March 1998, Vicki and Luis Gonzalez had a new marriage and a 6-week-old son, Alex.

When Luis applied for permanent residency, he was shocked to learn he faced a three-year ban because he had been in the United States without documents for more than six months.

And unless he left within two weeks, he would be barred not for three years but for 10.

"I was a wreck," Vicki Gonzalez says. "None of us could stop crying."

Before the 1996 law, her husband, who worked at a Beaverton auto auction and was a disc jockey, could have paid the $1,000 fee to adjust his status as the spouse of a U.S. citizen.

Instead, he had to return to Mexico to apply for a visa. Unless he could prove his absence would cause an extreme hardship for his family, he would be barred for three years.

He eventually prevailed, but it was of little consequence: It took more than two years and eight months.

In the meantime, he lived with his mother in Mexico City and worked for a telephone company for $10 a day while his wife took in a roommate to help pay the rent.

On Nov. 18, Luis finally received his visa and waiver and returned to Beaverton. In the time he was gone, his son had grown from tiny infant to a toddler.

"It's heartbreaking," Vicki Gonzalez says. "We've all missed so much, bonding and growing as a family."

Rohrabacher, who championed the change in law, says such cases do not weaken his conviction that anyone found in the United States illegally should be removed. Their families need not be split, he says.

"They can take their families with them when they go," he says.

"Look, a lot of these stories might tear at your heart, but we can't let our hearts tear apart helping someone who is not an American citizen if it has a bad impact on the lives of the American people."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Julie Sullivan

Oregonian Staff

The Immigration and Naturalization Service jails children as young as 8.

Last year, the INS held two-thirds of the 4,607 minors it took into custody in children's homes, foster homes and hotels before releasing or deporting them.

But seven years after the INS agreed to hold children in the "least restrictive setting appropriate for the minor's age and special needs," the agency still holds an estimated 35 percent in jails and youth detention centers across the country.

Human-rights groups say, for about 80 percent of the children, their only crimes are immigration offenses but the INS treats them as if they had burglarized homes.

They are locked in cells or dormitories and made to wear prison uniforms. Their visits, telephone calls and movements are restricted. Sometimes they're housed with criminal offenders, subjected to body searches or disciplined with pepper spray. Few have lawyers or guardians guiding them as they would in criminal proceedings. Many face immigration proceedings without a single trusted adult.

The INS has the right to jail children in emergency influxes such as a flood of refugees in a boatlift; if they are suspected of being an adult, if they are charged with a crime, or if they are simply awaiting transfers within three to five days. But more than half those booked into secure facilities in 1999 stayed longer than three days.

Most of them, such as a 15-year-old Central American girl who says she was fleeing her abusive father, aren't charged with a crime. In March, the girl, who says her father raped and beat her, fled to Los Angeles seeking her mother and stepfather. She was detained by the INS at the Los Angeles airport and booked into Los Padrinos, a juvenile jail. She was held with other INS detainees for six weeks according to interviews with her, her mother and her attorney.

"I thought," she says quietly, "that I would never see my family again." She's now living with her mother, attending high school and seeing a psychologist.

She couldn't understand the seven Chinese girls she shared a cell with. The only person she confided in for 10 days was a Spanish-speaking guard.

The INS separates some children from their parents, such as an 8-year-old Czech girl whose mother was trying to enter with false papers. The girl was held for two days at Los Padrinos while her mother was held in another INS facility.

"No other country in all the Western countries that receive unaccompanied minors does this," says Jacqueline Bhabha, director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago, an expert in international refugee law. "The U.S. is unique."

Half the world's 20 million refugees and displaced people are children, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports, with more heading to the United States each year.

Agency renews efforts

Recently, the INS has aggressively tried to deal more humanely with the spiraling numbers of children arriving alone. It has boosted the number of beds it rents in nonprofit and religious youth shelters in the United States from 131 to more than 600.

The agency adopted guidelines for child-asylum seekers two years ago that are among the most progressive and protective in the world. The INS has trained more than 15,000 employees and hundreds of nonprofit and jail workers in children's rights. The first INS shelter in the United States for entire families should open next year.

The agency's juvenile detention chief, John J. Pogash, 43, is a former juvenile probation officer and an expert in exploited children. He says he is tired of his agency being criticized for what he sees as sensible precautions designed to keep kids safe.

"The kids we take into custody are under more scrutiny and have more review than any other case in the service," Pogash says. "I can tell you what that person has for breakfast, literally."

But much of that review is conducted locally by 36 district directors who don't necessarily follow INS policies.

Last December The Oregonian reported that a Chinese girl, 15, and five Chinese boys spent eight to 12 months with violent offenders in the Multnomah County's juvenile jail waiting for their asylum cases to be heard. The "girl who cries," as she was dubbed by fellow inmates, was kept in jail more than seven weeks after she was granted political asylum. Portland INS officials maintained that the threats to her from smugglers, paperwork delays in identifying an uncle and conducting a home study prevented her release.

Affidavits filed in federal court by Portland INS staff members and the Oregon congressional delegation since reveal that the INS failed for six months to find the uncle, never told the girl whether she would be released and misled members of Congress about the histories of the other teens.

Within 10 days of the political storm that followed, the girl was placed in a foster home, a boy was placed with an uncle and four other children were transferred to detention centers in California and Arizona.

Looking for alternatives

Some jail workers and local officials try hard to help. Staff members at Northern Oregon Regional Corrections Facility in The Dalles make repeated international calls to help detained children reach family members. Multnomah County leaders criticized the INS for using their juvenile jail for children not charged with any crime.

But jailing kids is the only option the INS says it has in the Northwest because the agency does not contract with any children's home. The agency is looking for alternatives, Pogash says. Advocates want detained children placed with child-welfare agencies, which they say are better equipped to deal with traumatized children and would move them into foster care or less restrictive settings more quickly.

Congress proposed three laws this year requiring the INS to give detained children more legal advice; none passed. Immigration judges and the American Bar Association are offering legal help to children such as Angel Avila.

The 15-year-old was abandoned by his parents and raised by his grandmother in Honduras. He says he survived Hurricane Mitch, swam across the Rio Grande and hitchhiked to New York City "where everyone wants to go -- it's famous." He was arrested trying to steal a Walkman and was taken into INS custody to be deported.

After four months in a New York children's home, he was abruptly transferred to Los Angeles' oldest and largest juvenile jail, L.A. Central Juvenile Detention Center, two months ago.

There, he fought with gang members, was pepper-sprayed by staff members and finally placed in solitary confinement. Facing more time in jail, Avila decided Nov. 8 that he'd rather be voluntarily deported. He is still in jail, waiting for travel documents.

"Nothing good has happened here," he says.

"That's where detention is troubling," says Wendy Young, director of government relations and U.S. programs for the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. "Children are making life-altering and possibly life-threatening decisions just to get of jail."

Researchers Gail Hulden, Lynne Palombo and Lovelle Svart contributed to this series.

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Brent Walth

Oregonian Staff

NEWARK, Calif. -- Navaratnam Kamalthas spends his new days of liberty strolling through the NewPark Mall. Amid the shoppers in this Bay Area town, he walks past the Sunglass Hut and The Disney Store and the mall's dozens of other stores for hours each day, never buying a thing.

He simply walks, delighted by moving through the world, free.

"In jail, I could not walk anywhere," Kamalthas, 25, says. "Four years of not walking anywhere."

Kamalthas did jail time -- 1,415 days -- not because he was a criminal, or even charged with a crime. He entered the United States without the proper papers but with hopes of escaping the torture he says he suffered in his native Sri Lanka.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service welcomed him with a cell.

The United States stands tall among the world's nations as a compassionate country that flings open its arms to people seeking protection from persecution.

Freedom, however, is not guaranteed.

A wide range of human-rights and international organizations, including the United Nations, criticizes the United States' practice of jailing asylum seekers. The groups charge that the United States flouts an international treaty intended to shelter people fleeing torture and tyranny.

The INS estimates it now holds at least 1,500 people who have come to the United States and asked for political asylum, warehoused in a corner of the American justice system where due process and civil rights cannot reach. The agency admits it doesn't keep track of the number and the total could be higher.

INS officials say most people asking for asylum are never jailed. In the past year, 49,462 people applied for asylum. Most of them were already living legally in the United States and face no detention. The INS this year jailed the 10,250 who asked for asylum after arriving at U.S. ports with forged documents or no papers at all.

In all but a few hundred cases, the INS finds they have a "credible fear" of returning home and allows them to postpone deportation while they request asylum.

INS officials say they use detention to confirm identities and to keep asylum seekers from running away.

Case records show that about one in four asylum seekers released from detention never shows up for his or her hearing. Some flee to other countries, and others become illegal immigrants.

"We are all in agreement that a real refugee should not be detained," says Joanna Ruppel, a supervisory asylum officer in the INS Office of International Affairs.

But, she says, the system is often abused: "There are a lot of people who claim to be refugees who aren't."

The United Nations, the international watchdog for refugees, acknowledges countries must sometimes detain people entering illegally and seeking political asylum, as Kamalthas and thousands of others do each year.

The U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees, however, in 1999 issued guidelines establishing international detention standards:

People seeking asylum should be jailed as a last resort and for only a short time.

They should not be housed with criminals.

They should have the right to ask a judge for release.

But the laws of the United States and the actions of the INS guarantee none of those safeguards. Instead:

• The INS jails asylum seekers who arrive at U.S. borders without proper papers -- no questions asked. INS officials may release them after 48 hours, after an asylum officer hears their story. But many remain jailed until they receive asylum hearings, which may not take place for weeks or months. If the INS opposes their asylum claim, they can remain locked up for years.
• Jailed asylum seekers convicted of no U.S. crime are held alongside criminals in county jails all over the country.
• Unlike those criminals, asylum seekers have no right to ask a judge for release from jail on bond while their case is pending.
• In Kamalthas' case, Portland INS officials said they decided to release him, after nearly four years, when he showed that someone was willing to support him. Yet, Kamalthas' INS file and other documents show he had offers of support for three years before the INS released him.
• At the average of $78 a day the INS spends on detainees, jailing asylum seekers costs taxpayers at least $42.7 million a year. The agency has studied -- but not enacted -- cheaper and more efficient ways to keep released asylum seekers under close supervision.

"We look to the United States as a role model for the world," says Panos Moumtzis, spokesman for the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees. "People come to the United States thinking they have found freedom. They flee persecution and think they are coming to safe place. Instead they are treated like common criminals."

Knocking on the door

INS officials say their agency does all it can to consider the welfare of people jailed while arriving illegally to seek asylum, but that the law is tough.

Because they aren't U.S. citizens, or even residents, they aren't protected by the Constitution.

"From a legal standpoint, the law does not treat arriving aliens as having the same constitutional rights as people already in this country," says INS spokesman Russ Bergeron. "Even if they are here physically, the law treats them as if they are in the position of standing outside, knocking at the door."

Kamalthas still knocks, although he probably will never get in.

His asylum application has been rejected at every turn, and he faces deportation to Sri Lanka. "To sit in jail for that long to be sent back," he says, "is something I cannot understand."

Kamalthas' story is based on interviews with him in and out of jail, his family and friends, his lawyers, INS officials and his 530-page certified INS file, provided by his attorneys.

Until 1996, Kamalthas had spent his whole life in northern Sri Lanka. His family is Tamil, an ethnic minority that makes up 18 percent of the Sri Lankan population and is often oppressed by the majority Sinhalese. Since 1972, a bloody Tamil rebellion has led to atrocities on both sides, killing at least 54,000 .

Kamalthas' family lived in Jaffna, a Tamil stronghold. Tamil rebels sometimes tried to recruit young men, but Kamalthas says he resisted; a good student, he dreamed of going into business, not a guerrilla army.

International reports say Tamil rebels often kidnap young men they can't recruit. Kamalthas says rebels captured him in August 1996 and forced him to work 16 hours a day filling sandbags and digging bunkers. After three months, he says, he escaped the rebel camp during a government attack and, amid gunfire and explosions, fled by bus and bicycle to the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo.

There, he says, government troops stopped him in November 1996 at an army checkpoint and noted from his identification card that he was Tamil. Arrested and jailed, Kamalthas said he was tortured by police, who accused him of being a Tamil rebel.

"When I was naked, they started to beat me with plastic pipes and beat me with their boots," Kamalthas later testified on behalf of his asylum claim. "After that, they tied my hands at the wrist ... and then they started to beat me further....

"When I started to cry, they put the baton in my mouth. Then they would put my head under water and when I was gasping for breath, they would take me out and then when I tell them that I have only been a student, I have not been a (rebel), then once again they would put my head under the water."

The police held Kamalthas for seven days until, he says, an uncle paid police a bribe of about $880. (The annual per capita income in Sri Lanka is $3,800.) A doctor examined him in Sri Lanka and found "multiple contusions in the body" but no broken bones, according to a medical report provided The Oregonian by Kamalthas' lawyers.

"He was in severe body pain," Kamalthas' mother, Krishnar Saraswathy, said through a translator. "He didn't want to talk about what happened to him. We didn't take time to talk much about it. We had to rush him out of the country."

Kamalthas' parents sold land to pay a smuggler the equivalent of $14,000 to arrange for Kamalthas' travel to Canada. Kamalthas planned to seek asylum and stay with a friend of his father's.

Kamalthas says the smuggler took away his legal Sri Lankan passport and gave him a phony one, telling him a Malaysian passport would be accepted in more of the countries he would travel through on his way to Canada. He moved through Singapore, Hong Kong, China and South Korea before boarding Delta Airlines Flight 50 from Seoul to the Portland International Airport, arriving Dec. 17, 1996.

INS officials detained him when he admitted his Malaysian passport was phony and that he was on his way to Canada to ask for political asylum.

Kamalthas became Alien File No. A-73-436-759.

Rules governing asylum

Today, a nation's offer of refuge to oppressed people seems common. But the practice only blossomed after World War II, when millions of European refugees fled combat and persecution. In a 1951 treaty, the United Nations defined a refugee: someone who cannot return to his home country "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion."

But the legal definition of "persecution" is left to the nations willing to accept refugees.

Because winning asylum gains a refugee the right to live legally in the United States and the chance to become a U.S. citizen, the INS is on the lookout for fraud. In 1995, for example, when the INS closed loopholes that allowed asylum seekers quick access to work permits, the INS says frivolous asylum claims dropped dramatically.

Overall, about one in four people applying for asylum have their claim approved by the INS or an immigration judge, granting them the precious right to remain in the United States.

That prize makes the story an asylum seeker tells to an INS interviewer critical to his fate.

Kamalthas' interview took place three days after his arrest. He had spent the time in the Clark County, Wash., jail, too ill and upset to eat. INS officials drove him back to the airport for the interview, and he thought he would be deported to Sri Lanka at any moment.

"I was shivering," he says of the interview. "I was afraid. I was not in control."

Kamalthas then told a lie that would help keep him locked up for years.

"Have you ever had any problems with the police?" an INS agent asked him.

"No," Kamalthas replied.

Of course, he had. A Sri Lankan police memo given to The Oregonian by Kamalthas' lawyers confirms that Kamalthas was arrested and detained for seven days in November 1996, just as Kamalthas would later testify on behalf of his asylum claim.

Kamalthas acknowledges he didn't tell the truth. "I thought they would deport me if they thought I was bad," he says. He now says he had no idea he would end up seeking asylum in the United States -- he was headed for Canada -- and that his statement would be used against him.

INS officials and immigration lawyers agree that asylum cases often turn on such inconsistencies, usually because asylum seekers can offer no proof but their stories. Many asylum seekers, often without lawyers present, forget details or answer out of fear. Their interpreters might make errors in describing their account. The law tells INS officials and immigration judges to use the "exercise of discretion."

"The whole process becomes very subjective," says Jennifer Oltarsh, a New York immigration attorney. "The INS or a judge will be looking for even the slightest inconsistency, because they need something concrete if they're going to reject a claim."

In April 1997, Immigration Judge Kendall Warren rejected Kamalthas' asylum application. Warren found it difficult to believe Kamalthas would not have mentioned his police beatings during his INS airport interview. Besides, Warren ruled, he had found Kamalthas' demeanor to be "wooden" -- a sign, the judge said, of someone reciting a rehearsed story, not the truth.

Kamalthas' lawyers -- arranged for him through friends of his family -- appealed his case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews immigration judges' decisions, and then to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Both courts upheld the rejection. A second pending round of appeals is all that stops the INS from deporting Kamalthas to Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile, Kamalthas sat in jail alongside criminals -- first in Tehama County Jail in Red Bluff, Calif., then in Coos County Jail in Coquille, where the INS transferred him in July.

"No one ever told me I would be years in jail," Kamalthas said during a telephone interview from the Coos County Jail this fall. "No one told me what was happening to me."

U.S. detention unlimited

According to a Danish study financed by the European Union, most European countries do not make detention automatic or mandatory. And most require outside review of all detention cases. The same is true with Canada, according to U.N. officials.

In comparison, Congress in 1996 made detention mandatory and took away the right of detainees to see a judge about release from detention if they tried to enter illegally at U.S. ports.

Other countries limit the amount of time asylum seekers can remain jailed. In Switzerland, it's nine months. In Germany, it's six weeks. In the United States, there is no limit.

Advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights have investigated INS detention practices and denounced what they found.

So did a religious freedom task force in the U.S. State Department, which reported its "serious concerns" over the length of time, the conditions and the differing release policies from one INS district to another.

During his time jail, Kamalthas saw other Sri Lankans detained by the INS but under the authority of districts other than Portland win release. Kamalthas would ask his INS detention officer, Harvey Seeley, why he was not released.

"That will never happen," Seeley replied, according to Kamalthas. "Don't you know that the Portland INS never lets people out on bond?"

According to Kamalthas, Seeley told him, "If you don't drop this fight, you'll just sit here in jail for another year." Seeley confirms that's what he told Kamalthas.

Back in Sri Lanka, Kamalthas' parents despaired. "We don't understand what is going on," Kamalthas' mother said in an interview while her son was still detained. "We are always in tears."

At one point, Kamalthas wrote his parents to say he had decided to give up his fight. His parents persuaded him to change his mind. "They told me of seeing bodies along the riverside and warned me not to come back," he said.

Still, Kamalthas wondered each day if he made the right choice. "To die in Sri Lanka," he said during an interview in jail, "is better than a lifetime in jail."

In Coos County Jail, a guard who couldn't understand Kamalthas' broken English nicknamed him "Misfit." Kamalthas said he was allowed out of his cell only four hours a day -- one hour in the morning, one in the afternoon, and two in the evening. On some days, he said, he was too weak to walk.

"Sometimes when I try to read and learn something, my mind is not right," he said from jail. "I feel like I am losing my mind."

He began to see another way out.

"I think about suiciding myself," Kamalthas said from jail. "Sometimes I'm OK, but then they lock up the room, and I don't know who I am. I came to jail when I was just 21. I never see sunlight. I sit in a cell where I do not know which is north or south. I don't hate this country. I only want freedom."

Then, suddenly, he got it.

On Nov. 1, the Portland INS let him go.

The Portland office offered Kamalthas parole after an inquiry from U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who had been alerted to the case by Siva Tharmarajah, a Sri Lankan immigrant who had never met Kamalthas but had heard about his situation. Stark wanted to know why Kamalthas was being held even after Tharmarajah and others had offered to support him. Now a U.S. citizen, Tharmarajah sat in INS detention for five months when he arrived in San Francisco 12 years ago.

Stark's inquiries came two weeks after Portland INS District Director David Beebe had resigned amid criticism from community leaders and Oregon's congressional delegation for mistreatment of international travelers at the Portland airport.

The Portland INS' chief detention officer, W. Scott Cihlar, says the fallout has prompted the local office to be more flexible. "We're trying to do the kinder, gentler thing," Cihlar says.

Out on a $10,000 bond, Kamalthas now stays with Tharmarajah, Tharmarajah's wife and son, and two other Sri Lankan immigrants in a two-bedroom townhouse in Newark, near Fremont, about 15 miles north of San Jose. If his last appeal fails, the INS will summon him for deportation.

Kamalthas spent four birthdays behind bars. He grew three inches taller while in jail. He thinks of all those lost days. He hears stories of Sri Lankans who face jail and worse after they are deported. He has nightmares. He dreams he is back in jail. In his dream, he struggles to breathe. When he wakes, it takes him a long time to remember where he is now.

"I try to be happy," he says. "After this, I am still a lot of the time sad."

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Step into the detention and deportation section of Portland's U.S. immigration office and enter a world of racism, sexism and questionable conduct.

Some supervisors and officers call foreigners "wets" -- for "wetbacks" -- and "tonks," U.S. Border Patrol slang for the sound of a flashlight hitting an illegal immigrant's head. Employees complain that an officer, later promoted to supervisor, tells an African American colleague and others he can't stand "niggers and white trash."

Officers jokingly toss packets of condoms into mailboxes of colleagues preparing to escort deportees abroad, until their supervisor warns them that hiring prostitutes during work trips is unprofessional.

A deportation supervisor derails an elaborate raid on an illegal immigrant camp by contacting foreign diplomats -- and then gets transferred and promoted, until he heads long-term detention for the entire INS. Far worse things have happened, he points out: His predecessor in Portland was convicted of sexually abusing an 11-year-old migrant girl.

While the Portland unit seethes with hatred and recrimination, it may not typify U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service offices across the country. Many dedicated people work for the nation's largest law-enforcement agency, which includes 21,000 gun-carrying officers.

But the INS is hamstrung by a decades-old culture of abuse and ineptitude evident in interviews of employees around the country and a review of thousands of pages of court records, internal documents and investigative reports. Isolation and frustration encourage values and behavior considered unacceptable in the larger society.

Across the nation, judges, members of Congress, academics and former top officials of the INS and its parent agency, the Justice Department, say that:

• Rapid growth in the numbers of Border Patrol agents and other officers threatens performance standards and dilutes supervision.
• INS training produces hard-nosed attitudes that emphasize enforcement at the expense of service.
• Low pay and grueling work conditions hurt morale and invite abuse of both foreigners and co-workers.
• District directors run their 36 jurisdictions as feudal domains, leading to uneven application of the law.
• Supervisors trying to discipline employees are often thwarted by federal protections for workers.

Acting INS Commissioner Mary Ann Wyrsch disputes the assessment and The Oregonian's findings, saying she hasn't seen a culture of sexism, racism or misconduct.

While acknowledging that supervisory ranks are thin and that pay could be increased, Wyrsch says low pay and existing work conditions do not hurt morale.

She defends the breadth of training, and describes the agency's workforce as "terrific" -- even capable of heroism during international crises.

"There is a vastly underappreciated workforce here that we need to sing and celebrate," Wyrsch says. "We field a very well-trained and competent staff."

Yet in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, junior members and senior, castigate the agency for abuses, misconduct, rudeness and unresponsiveness.

Rep. Harold K. Rogers, R-Ky., for 18 years a member of the House Appropriations Committee -- which oversees the Justice Department -- says the INS resists discipline and management.

"The entire agency is so encrusted all the way down to the ground, it just does not respond to directions from the top," Rogers says.

"Personnel rules prevent effective discipline. The morale is poor. The culture leads to disregard for directives."

Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill., says the agency generates 80 percent of her calls from constituents. "The enforcement side of the INS dominates the culture of the agency so that all too often everybody is viewed as a potential criminal," Schakowsky says, "and all they're asking for is to get their passport stamped."

Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann -- who observed the INS in 1993 and 1994 as deputy U.S. attorney general, agrees. "The INS is definitely worse than its counterparts and has been the problem area of the Justice Department for at least 20 years," Heymann says.

Michael Bromwich, the inspector general who was responsible for investigating the INS and other Justice Department agencies from 1994 to 1999, says the INS consistently accounts for far more misconduct and corruption than the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons and the Marshals Service.

"The INS is notorious for having the most serious and pervasive management and misconduct problems of any part of the Justice Department," Bromwich says. "This has been the case for many, many years. Part of the problem is the culture of the agency which has resisted the management controls necessary to impose accountability."

"System engenders problems"

The INS and the inspector general's office launched a record 4,551 internal investigations last year -- one per seven workers -- in an agency that employs 32,000. Allegations, most by employees, ranged from harassment of coworkers to drug smuggling and bribery to civil-rights violations.

By contrast, internal investigators opened one inquiry per 25 DEA employees in fiscal 2000, one per 19 Customs Service employees in fiscal 1999 and about one per 50 FBI employees that year. INS workers received discipline at a rate three times that for FBI employees and nearly four times that for Customs employees.

Bromwich and others say the lopsided comparisons result from a deeply troubled agency, not from the INS policing itself more thoroughly. One indication: Arrests of INS workers are more than twice as common as arrests of employees of the Bureau of Prisons, an agency of comparable size.

John Chase, who heads the INS Office of Internal Audit and oversees the agency's internal investigations, rejects the comparisons.

Chase acknowledges that the number of investigations has more than doubled since 1996. He says that isn't high, considering the INS had 550 million encounters with people last year, most at border crossings.

"We'd like to see that go down, but if you look at it in context, it's not bad," Chase says. "That's 550 million opportunities to abuse your authority."

Chase says misconduct results from a few bad apples. Yet immigration lawyers, human rights groups and professors contend the misconduct is ingrained.

"There doesn't seem to be a system in place that adequately punishes people who abuse their power," says Charles Kuck, an Atlanta attorney and American Immigration Lawyers Association board member. "You get a letter put in your file; you don't get fired."

For example, one officer who accused a fellow inspector of targeting him for his religious beliefs waited three years for an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision, only to hear that his co-worker would go unpunished because he had offended without discriminating.

"The record strongly suggests that the offending individual treated co-workers equally bad," the adjudicator concluded, "regardless of their religious backgrounds. The offending individual was perceived as undiplomatic, critical, intimidating, verbally abusive, hostile, confrontational, explosive, threatening, a bully, rude, nasty, an agitator or an instigator, a troublemaker, arrogant, overbearing and abrasive -- by Methodists, Protestants, Mormons, Catholics, Lutherans and others."

Guardians and bouncers

INS officers who like their jobs are often quick to voice frustrations. "We're working at remote border stations at night, intercepting wanted felons," says Sean Casey, an inspector who works solo at a tiny port of entry in Beebe Plain, Vt. Casey once caught a truck driver smuggling 28 illegal immigrants. "Any one of those people might not have anything to lose."

"I try to treat people professionally," says Tom Faucher, an inspector in nearby Canaan, Vt., "so even when I send them back they'll say, 'Thank you.'"

Faucher, Casey and other inspectors covet the special law-enforcement status enjoyed by many other federal officers, who earn better benefits as a result.

Thomas J. "T.J." Bondurant, the Justice Department's assistant inspector general for investigations, says stress and frustration figure into many crimes by INS employees, especially along the teeming Southwest border. "I think it is a stressful job for the Border Patrol," he says. "It's the kind of job where, at the end of the shift each day, if you asked yourself 'What did I accomplish?' it's very difficult to say exactly what was achieved."

Josiah Heyman, a Michigan Technological University anthropologist who studied the culture of Border Patrol agents on the Mexican border, agrees: "You stick a person who has a can-do attitude in an endlessly repetitive and frustrating situation, then some people succumb to a variety of things," Heyman says. "They blame immigrants or they succumb to cynicism and become angry, and it helps encourage corruption sometimes and burnout."

Examples pop up around the country. In Texas, an inspector demands sexual favors from a Mexican woman who presents fraudulent documents. In New York, an inspector helps a deported felon re-enter the country. In Arizona, a Border Patrol agent punches an illegal immigrant in the face, breaking his nose, after officers apprehend the Mexican for running across the border.

The abuses flow from a variety of causes, critics say:

• Rapid growth has compounded the agency's problems.

The number of Border Patrol agents, inspectors and detention enforcement officers has roughly doubled since 1994 as Congress has increased INS funding.

As a result, recruits emerging from the academy don't get the close attention they need from experienced agents, says T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing agents.

• INS training is inadequate and emphasizes the wrong things.
• Bill Carroll, a former INS academy instructor and district director in Washington, D.C., says the curriculum should be broadened to include more material helpful to understanding immigrants and their motives. "If you're taught that, 'Hey, you're here as the guardian at the gate,' and that's all you know, it's like you're the bouncer at the bar," Carroll says. "If you understand the reasons for immigration, then you're not going to take it out personally on the people."
• Low pay makes it hard to recruit the best people.
• Starting INS inspectors earn less than $30,000 a year during their first two years, compared to $39,000 for FBI agents.
• The law encourages the dark side of INS culture.
• Foreigners must convince inspectors that they are eligible to enter the country. Foreigners not yet admitted to the country aren't protected by the Constitution. "You're the only law-enforcement officer in the country that is charged with determining if somebody's going to do something that's against the law," says Noel Induni, INS officer in charge of 16 U.S.-Canada entry ports near St. Albans, Vt. "You've got to make a decision usually within 30 seconds whether to send a person into secondary inspection or admit them."
• Supervisors evaluate officers differently in different districts.

Inspectors at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, for example, can win promotions and cash awards when they cause the rejection of at least 21 percent more foreigners than the airport average.

Congress compounded the potential for abuse in 1996 when it gave officers the power to deport foreigners without court review. And INS inspectors deal with non-citizens who are essentially powerless, unlike the taxpayers, voters and businesspeople who encounter the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies.

"You don't get in the same trouble if you're abusive with an alien," says Philip Heymann, the Harvard professor, "as if you're abusive with citizens."

But the INS was in trouble long before 1996. Sid Lezak, U.S. Attorney for Oregon from 1961 to 1982, saw a clear gap between the professionalism required of INS officers and those of other agencies.

"Even in the FBI and the DEA," Lezak says, "many of the agents had a degree of humanity that was lacking to some extent in the INS."

Portland problems mount

The problems Lezak encountered in Portland haven't gone away. A series of highly publicized cases focused public attention this year on excesses by INS inspectors at Portland International Airport.

More revelations seem likely. Unpublicized investigations -- including ones by the INS internal audit office, the Equal Employment Opportunity office, the Federal Labor Relations Authority and possibly the Justice Department inspector general -- are zeroing in on the Portland district's detention and deportation section.

Charity Reeves, a former Portland detention enforcement officer, says the section suffers from an attitude of superiority toward foreigners that encourages misconduct and abuse. Reeves left the INS after suffering a disabling knee injury at the officers' academy. "When you deal with people every day who you think are less than you," Reeves says, "it gives you a certain power pump."

Reeves, 31, worked for the INS from March 1998 to March of this year. A former U.S. Army supply sergeant at Fort Bragg, N.C., she and other officers say racial slurs, abuse and misconduct were common in the Portland office.

For example, Reeves recalls Roger Pelletier, a detention enforcement officer at the time, telling her that there were, as she remembers his words, "two things that he could not stand, and that was niggers and white trash." Another officer says Pelletier told him and a fellow officer the same thing on different occasions. Pelletier, who has since been promoted to supervise a dozen officers who guard, process and transport detainees, declines to comment.

Reeves filed a statement with the INS workers' union, saying Pelletier sexually harassed her, smacking her buttocks and feeling her inner and outer thigh. In the statement, Reeves also charges that Pelletier acknowledged at a staff meeting last year that he had made the racial statement numerous times. She says Pelletier castigated an officer who criticized him at the meeting, accusing the officer of betrayal.

INS investigators have completed a report on her allegations. The Oregonian requested it in October under the Freedom of Information Act, and Reeves signed a statement permitting the release of the document, but the INS hasn't acted on the request. The agency deleted findings concerning the detention/deportation section from another investigative report released under the act.

Pelletier has been transferred temporarily to instruct detention officers at the INS advanced training academy in Artesia, N.M. Supervisors say the transfer is not a disciplinary action.

In addition to these allegations, other reports suggest a pattern of misconduct and slipshod practices in the Portland district. According to police and court records, Oscar Villa, a deportation officer, was arrested July 29 in Clark County, Wash., and accused of driving an INS car while drunk. He told the arresting officer that he was driving the government vehicle home from an INS awards ceremony. Villa admitted the crime and entered a court-ordered alcohol-treatment program, prosecutors say.

The internal audit office is investigating Villa's case, according to Charles DeMore, acting INS Portland district director.

The office is also investigating allegations that an officer improperly discharged a firearm in 1995, DeMore says, during what co-workers describe as an attempted escape by a detainee in downtown Portland. Investigators will examine why the allegation didn't surface until this October, he says.

"The people who covered it up in a sense are as culpable as those who did it, if in fact it happened," DeMore says. He says that these sorts of incidents do not typify INS workers' conduct, and adds that some other recent investigations have not substantiated several additional allegations made by employees.

Employees say that during a staff meeting June 5, supervisory detention/deportation officer Paige Edenfield told Portland officers that it was unprofessional to visit strip joints and prostitutes and get drunk while escorting deportees abroad. After that, officers stopped tossing condoms into mailboxes of colleagues departing on foreign trips, one of the officers who participated in the prank says.

Edenfield declines all comment.

A hotel bill for Mike Greene, a detention enforcement officer who traveled to Costa Rica on such a trip last year, shows a charge for an extra guest, using a code that hotel workers say was often used to note a visit by a woman engaged in legalized prostitution.

"If in fact that's happening," Greene says, "I'm a good-looking guy, and I'm able to meet women, and I've done that. There's nothing that says I can't invite somebody to a room, my room, and have a nice evening."

Questionable judgment figures in other INS incidents. Robert Shannon was Portland assistant district director for detention and deportation in 1997, when INS agents planned an elaborate raid on a Clackamas County migrant camp. Agents obtained a sealed search warrant and flew in INS officers from around the West to help. But they called off the raid, saying Shannon had contacted the Mexican and Guatemalan consulates.

Shannon was transferred to Puerto Rico and then promoted to INS director of removal operations in Washington, D.C. He says he merely contacted the consulates to make sure officials would be available to process a busload of detainees. The agency has not released a report on the incident to The Oregonian.

Anyway, Shannon says, the Portland district has had worse problems, such as the 1992 conviction of his predecessor, Olen Ray Jones, for sexually abusing an 11-year-old Mexican girl whose parents sought work permits from the INS.

Racial incidents and corruption among Portland INS officers extend at least as far back as the 1950s, says Fred Caramela, a retired immigration inspector. Caramela, 72, began as an INS stenographer in 1952 and worked until 1983.

"I used to go on raids with them," says Caramela, an Italian American with a tan complexion, "and twice they shoved me into a county cell with all the Mexicans and thought it was a big joke because the jailer didn't know who I was."

More recently, an INS officer policing a line of applicants outside the agency's Chicago office was equally unsuspecting, according to one of those in line. She cut off service at 10:30 a.m. July 7, 1999, and told the applicants, who had started lining up at 4 a.m., to disperse.

"I didn't move fast enough," says the woman who was waiting. "So she sticks her finger in my face and says, 'Move, or go to jail.' "

The woman started to respond. The INS officer cut her off and asked, "Well, who are you?"

"First of all," said the woman, "I'm a human being. And nobody should be talked to that way.

"And secondly, I'm a member of the U.S. Congress."

The woman was, in fact, Rep. Janice Schakowsky, the Democratic congresswoman deluged with constituent complaints about the INS. She'd paid an incognito visit to the Chicago office to check out the service for herself.

The INS officer hastened to explain the treatment was even-handed. "She says, 'Well,'" Schakowsky recalls," 'I talk to everybody that way.'"

© 2000, The Oregonian

By Richard Read

Oregonian Staff

Reformers examined the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1940, seven years after the agency was created, and suggested a merger that seemed sensible.

Let's combine INS and Customs inspectors, they said, eliminating parallel bureaucracies at U.S. ports of entry. But 60 years and more than 30 studies, commissions and reorganizations later, nothing of the sort has happened.

The INS remains in the Justice Department, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it from the Labor Department in 1940, citing wartime security concerns. Critics blame many of the agency's spectacular failings on the resulting law-enforcement mentality that pervades even INS services such as naturalization, asylum decisions and refugee applications.

"Just about anyone who has studied the immigration system over the last 20 years has concluded that there needs to be a separation of the enforcement and service responsibilities," says Robert Hill, a Washington, D.C., immigration lawyer.

Hill served on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which in 1997 recommended moving key INS services to the State Department. Political momentum for reform has since dwindled. But Hill and others think the incoming Bush administration will be freer to act than Democrats tied to recent INS leadership.

Any restructuring of the agency must occur against the backdrop of immigration policy, a divisive issue that continues to trouble lawmakers. Politicians tread gingerly as the country balances its tradition of welcoming newcomers with fears of immigration's effects on jobs, schools and the environment.

Democrats and Republicans express interest in reforms to:

• Remove or redefine the jobs of INS district directors, the 36 managers who exercise far-reaching authority and autonomy. In Portland, former District Director David Beebe retired under pressure Oct. 3 after outrage over heavy-handed enforcement.
• Scrap the retroactive provision of the 1996 law that allows the INS to deport immigrants because of minor crimes committed years ago. U.S. Reps. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., and Lamar Smith, R-Texas, former supporters, now favor eliminating the measure.
• Restore judicial review over INS officers empowered by the 1996 law to reject foreigners and to ban them from the United States for as long as 10 years.
• Improve officers' training, pay and working conditions.
• Cut backlogs of applications for citizenship and other benefits.

People who wait hours in lines and suffer rudeness or mistreatment say they would be pleased if the agency merely became more accessible. Installing phone and fax lines or enabling electronic application filing would not require acts of Congress.

Some reformers want the service side of the INS to operate more like a business, along the lines of the U.S. Postal Service.

Even the INS favors a sharper line between service and enforcement -- albeit within the existing agency -- under a plan remaining from the Clinton administration.

But reformers disagree whether to cut the agency in two, to keep it intact with dual divisions or to farm out some responsibilities.

The reform commission wanted new divisions of the Justice Department to retain immigration enforcement, the State Department to process immigration-related applications and the Labor Department to enforce immigrant employment standards. It wanted to create an independent agency to review immigration appeals.

But that approach would be destructive to the INS, says Demetrios Papademetriou, co-director of the international migration policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"You would create a complete catastrophe, a black hole," Papademetriou says. He co-wrote a 1997 report that advocated a new Cabinet-level agency combining immigration-related functions of the INS, State and Labor departments, while separating service and enforcement.

Mark Hetfield, a Refugee Council USA adviser, says reformers should not divide the agency in anger. "Simply splitting the INS in two would only replace one troublesome bureaucracy with two troublesome and warring bureaucracies," Hetfield says.

Shirley Hufstedler, a former U.S. education secretary who chaired the reform commission, says reform may be easier because extreme resentment toward immigration has decreased because of economic growth.

But Hufstedler doesn't expect quick action, paraphrasing former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Arthur T. Vanderbilt: "Restructuring governments is not for the short-winded."

© 2000, The Oregonian