Hopes, Fears Mix in Wake of INS Raid

On Friday, Raul Anicua showed up at the gate to the Vogue Coach Corp. in Sun Valley to get a job, maybe the one that had belonged to Ana Solorzano’s husband. Ana Solorzano, meanwhile, was at the plant to get money and signatures in a desperate attempt to keep her husband from being deported.

Both Anicua’s opportunity and Solorzano’s desperation had roots in what happened the day before, when immigration agents rounded up Solorzano’s husband and 62 other alleged illegal aliens employed at Vogue Coach. It was one in a weeklong series of raids that ended Friday, in which the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested 936 workers. The idea, the INS says, was to enforce immigration laws and free up jobs for legal residents or citizens like Anicua.

Friday, in the last two roundups, INS agents arrested 116 laborers gathered at two street corners in the San Fernando Valley--in Canoga Park and Van Nuys--looking for work in suburban gardens and construction sites.

Anicua was not the only job-seeker and Solorzano was not the only distraught wife responding to the Vogue Coach raid. Employees said job-seekers and wives of seized workers had been coming around since 7 a.m. In a dusty lot near the Tuxedo Road entrance to the 60,000-square-foot plant, which produces recreational vehicles, were clusters of automobiles that employees said had been left behind by people the INS took away. The company, as Anicua learned, will start accepting job applications for the vacated jobs Monday.

“I need a job,” said Anicua, who said he has been unemployed for four months since being laid off by a company that rents recreational vehicles to movie studios.

Said Solorzano: “If they send my husband back, I don’t think he will be able to come back here again.”

Husband Taken to Lockup

Solorzano says her husband, Luis Alberto Benavides, carried an expired visa issued in his native Costa Rica. The INS moves fast: After the 11:30 a.m. roundup at Vogue Coach on Thursday, her husband was taken to the INS lockup downtown; by Friday morning, he had been moved to San Diego. His wife had been told he could be returned to Costa Rica within days unless an immigration lawyer she had just hired could prevent it. She says the INS also informed her she needed $5,000 to bail him out. She didn’t have it, but was trying to borrow from friends, she said.

Solorzano, who said she has a valid residency permit, said she has lived in Burbank since 1981, with her husband, mother-in-law and three children. He had been in this country for five years. She, for 16. She said she had raised half of the $5,000.

A spokesman for the INS declared Operation Employer a success Friday. After the last of the 10 raids conducted throughout the Los Angeles area was over, INS spokesman Joe Flanders said, “I believe it opened up a few jobs.”

Returns to U.S. Predicted

Flanders then acknowledged that many of the Mexican deportees would soon cross the border again and probably return to their old jobs or similar ones. From countries farther away, like Costa Rica, he said, returning might be more difficult.

A Times survey taken after Operation Jobs in 1982 showed that 80% of the illegal workers arrested in Los Angeles and Orange counties were back on their jobs within three months.

Flanders said INS officials hoped Operation Employer would “spotlight for the American public the need for legislation making it illegal to employ illegal aliens.”

Garrin Halsch, executive vice president with Vogue Coach, said he never knowingly employed illegal aliens and said that, after raids like Thursday’s, the INS often learns that people have valid documents stashed at home and releases them.

About 20 Scaled Fence

“That happens sometimes,” said Flanders. He added he didn’t know in how many cases such a reversal would happen with Vogue Coach employees.

It was Halsch whom Solorzano had come to for signatures on immigration documents a lawyer had given her, to show her husband was employed in the United States.

About 20 people were luckier than her husband Thursday--they escaped the Vogue Coach roundup by clambering over a high, barbed-wire fence behind the plant, two company employees said. “There’s one guy who weighs about 300 pounds. He can barely walk with his weight, and I saw him reach up, wrap his hands around the barbed wire and heave himself over,” one employee said.

Street-Corner Raids

Four of the INS raids, including two in the Valley, were conducted at street corners where laborers gather in hopes of being picked up for day work. Six others were at manufacturing companies. Of the raided companies, only Vogue Coach is located in the Valley.

Halsch said the raid would affect Vogue only temporarily, but that even the slowing of its assembly line on Thursday and Friday could cost the company thousands of dollars. The company assembles about one vehicle a day.

Halsch said wages ranged from $5.50 to $7.50 an hour. “A lot of these people who they took are very skilled,” he said, noting that Ana Solorzano’s husband had risen over five years to be second in charge of the welding shop.

“He was a very good man,” he said.