Trial of Man in INS Shredding Case Goes to Jury Today

Jurors today will ponder the fate of a clerical worker at a federal government processing center in Laguna Niguel who destroyed thousands of documents related to active immigration and naturalization applications.

At issue is whether the worker shredded the documents intentionally to eliminate a filing backlog. The destruction of documents jeopardizes applications by persons who might not yet know their paperwork is gone.

A federal prosecutor argued to jurors that Leonel Salazar, 35, of Laguna Niguel participated in a conspiracy to shred documents critical to the processing of immigration and naturalization requests.

“He acted willfully,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Greg Staples said. “The orders he gave to his clerks to shred the documents were intentional, were not mistakes and they were not accidents.”

Salazar was indicted in January with his supervisor, Dawn Randall, 25, of San Clemente on criminal charges of conspiracy and willfully destroying documents.

Randall’s trial is set to begin in March.

Closing arguments in Salazar’s trial were presented Thursday in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Alicemarie Stotler in Santa Ana. If convicted, Salazar could be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Salazar and Randall, employees of a private contractor for the federal government, worked in the file room of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s California Service Center in Laguna Niguel. The center receives all mail from Arizona, California, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam.

The indictments came after INS officials discovered that thousands of unprocessed documents had been destroyed in early 2002 when Randall ordered Salazar, a lower-level supervisor, to begin shredding documents after an inventory revealed a processing backlog of about 90,000 documents.

According to prosecutors, the documents included marriage certificates, checks, money orders, immigration applications and passports issued by other nations, which typically are turned in to the U.S. government when a person seeks citizenship.

Salazar’s attorney agreed documents were shredded, but said it was not done maliciously. He said the case simply revealed a huge, poorly managed government filing operation with little if any quality control.

In his defense, Salazar, 35, was depicted as a low-rung clerical supervisor earning $31,000 a year who followed policy and was never informed by any of his managers, including Randall, that he had done anything illegal.