Hearing Set on Protest of INS Tactics in El Centro

As the number of immigrants participating in a hunger strike dwindled to seven Friday at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s processing center in El Centro, a federal judge in Los Angeles scheduled a hearing for Tuesday on complaints by the strikers’ attorney about INS tactics.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Mark Rosenbaum said the INS broke the strike by intimidation, cutting off strikers from their lawyers and transferring most of their leaders to other detention centers in Denver, San Diego and Inglewood.

There were 180 immigrants taking part in the strike when it began Monday to protest conditions at the El Centro center, according to documents filed in federal court.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Lawrence Chamblee told U.S. District Judge David Kenyon during Friday’s court session in Los Angeles that the charges by attorneys representing Salvadoran immigrants were exaggerated.

“What I think we have here is a big non-problem,” Chamblee said in defending the conduct of INS officials.

Chamblee specifically denied that there had been shuttling of immigrants to other facilities because they participated in the hunger strike.

“Nobody who was not already scheduled for a transfer was sent anywhere else,” he told the judge.

But Kenyon directed him to provide a list at Tuesday’s hearing that would show the current location of all the Salvadoran immigrants who took part in the strike.

At a press conference in Los Angeles Friday evening, organized by El Rescate (The Rescue), a former hunger striker said that 50 or more officers in full riot gear ran into the protesters at the center on Thursday. He said the officers kicked and beat the strikers to make them disperse.

“They knew I was one of the leaders,” Jose Israel Murillo Gomez said, “so five of them approached me and started kicking me with clubs over the head and body and covering my mouth so I couldn’t shout to the other strikers not to give up.”

Murillo Gomez said he was knocked unconscious and dragged around the detention center “as an example to the other detainees of what would happen if they continued the strike.”

Murillo Gomez displayed bruises on his face and body.

James Turnage Jr., INS district director in San Diego, denied that the immigrants were mistreated, saying that the agency videotaped the move of the strikers from an exercise yard back into their barracks.

But Guillermo Rodezno, director of El Rescate, said that two senior immigration officers in El Centro admitted to members of his group that force was used by INS and Border Patrol agents to break up the hunger strike. They conceded that several strikers were injured, Rodezno said.

He said that the two INS officers confirmed that the seven still on a hunger strike were being held in isolation. Access to the El Centro center was being forbidden to anyone other than attorneys for those detainees not still on strike.