Regional INS Chief Nurtures His Image : Missionary’s Zeal Spurs Guardian of U.S. Border

Four thousand new citizens looked up with collective awe at Harold Ezell.

As the western regional director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prepared to address the massive naturalization ceremony, he held in one hand a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

On his lapel Ezell wore a miniature Miss Liberty with a diamond in her torch that lit up at the touch of his finger. As usual, he wore his favorite tie clasp: a gold bar with the presidential seal engraved in the presidential hand, “Ronald Reagan.”

Ezell welcomed the new citizens, and then raised a miniature American flag high into the air and waved it. Below him, on the floor of the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center, 4,000 hands shot into the air to wave little flags of their own.

“A lot of people accuse us of being kind of flag-wavers in the INS,” he told his audience. “But a flag represents thousands of people. Don’t ever be ashamed of being a flag-waver!”

Ever since Hal Ezell, 48, was named to the then-obscure job of regional INS director in 1983, he has been carrying the banner of patriotism into battle against what he believes to be America’s most insidious enemy: the illegal alien.

A former fast-food executive and an adjunct member of President Reagan’s California Kitchen Cabinet, Ezell has become one of the Reagan Administration’s most strident and most controversial proponents of immigration reform.

Most recently, he went to City Hall to fight a resolution declaring Los Angeles a “city of sanctuary” for Central American refugees. When he lost that battle, he angrily threatened to investigate ways to cut off federal funds to the city, and to sue council members.

Ezell also authorized a covert investigation into the sanctuary movement in which a federal informant later secretly taped a Presbyterian church service in Phoenix--the first time the government is known to have bugged a public church service. Eleven church and lay activists are now on trial on alien-smuggling charges as a result of that investigation.

Threat to Business

Although he has taken flak for his anti-sanctuary stands, Ezell believes the controversy results from the threat he poses to millions of illegal immigrants--and the big business that depends upon their labor.

“I represent what I believe to be mainline America’s position,” he said.

“We’re not the same as when the Statue of Liberty was erected 100 years ago. We’re not out recruiting people to develop our resources anymore. Instead, our resources are being depleted. . . . In my opinion, illegal immigration will destroy what we know as a free society in the next five to 10 years unless. . . .”

Unless?

He pauses.

“Someday the citizenry is going to be fed up like the guy in (the movie) ‘Network,’ ” he says. “You know, the guy who stuck his head out the window . . . and screamed, ‘I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore.’ ”

Ezell comes across in person as far more thoughtful--and, one is inclined to say, thinner-skinned--than one would suspect from his dictum-a-minute rhetoric. When he is not on the attack, what’s left is an enthusiastic, got-to-get-the-word-out quality that by all accounts is genuine.

Not even his severest critics call him a hypocrite.

“I think he’s quite sincere,” said Peter Schey, executive director of the National Center for Immigrants Rights Inc., and probably Ezell’s most strident regular critic. “I think he sincerely believes that the United States is under siege. He just doesn’t ever see the other side to the story.”

Ezell admits he doesn’t know many illegal aliens.

View of His Job

Der Wienerschnitzel, the hot dog chain that he helped build, didn’t hire them, he says. (“It’s hamburgers that hire illegals because they have kitchens.”) Although he doesn’t speak Spanish, Ezell says he has interviewed some illegal aliens through translators on his current job.

‘Illegal aliens don’t exactly hang around when I’m in the neighborhood,” he says. “Besides, my job is not to understand illegals, it’s to enforce the law.”

Roger Conner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based group, described Ezell, his ally in the crusade for border control, in a telephone interview as “a missionary for the immigration service, a missionary with zeal.”

“He’s controversial because he’s not content to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “He’s trying to avert the iceberg . . . He has an appeal that’s a lot like Reagan’s,” he said. “It’s as if he just sat down one day and read the law and discovered, ‘My God, the laws are being violated! And on a massive level!’ ”

Known Far and Wide

It is that zeal, as well as Ezell’s propensity for making the sort of declarations normally reserved for national officials that have earned Ezell renown far beyond the borders of his active, but limited, region.

“I don’t even know the names of the other INS regional commissioners,” said Wade Henderson, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, who has been active in immigration issues.

“But Ezell has a national persona that we’re not used to. Here is a regional official speaking for national policy. Usually an agency speaks with one voice--and that comes from the head of an agency, not some regional official somewhere.”

In April, for example, Ezell sent a letter to Rep. John Moakley (D-Mass.), criticizing the congressman’s proposal to give temporary stays of deportation to all Salvadorans. But he didn’t stop there. He went on to criticize the tradition of giving such stays in general even though the Reagan Administration itself has granted them.

“Am I to interpret from your comments that the Administration now regrets its offer of protection to Poles and other nationalities?” Moakley wrote back.

Surprise for Washington

That was obviously not his intention. But Ezell often finds himself in such positions. Last week, when Ezell threatened to talk congressmen into cutting back federal funds to Los Angeles in retaliation for the sanctuary declaration, he caught Washington by surprise. One INS spokesman said his comments were “unauthorized.” Another explained that he was on the “cutting edge” of INS on the issue.

Sen. Alan Cranston, (D-Calif.) said Saturday that he was sending a letter to President Reagan calling Ezell’s threat the product of a “Big Brother mind-set . . . that waved the flag of oppressive big government,” and asked him to “repudiate” Ezell’s proposed cutbacks as “totally inconsistent with your own viewpoint.”

Asked if he did not consider Ezell out of line in making what appear to be national policy statements for the INS, Commissioner Alan C. Nelson said:

“It is logical for issues like these to arise in regional settings, especially in the western region, where so much of our work is. Hal is generally obviously very aggressive and has done an excellent job. He speaks out clearly and strongly. He has taken a strong posture, which I want him to do.”

Son of a Minister

It is fitting that Ezell should be compared to a missionary. He is the son of an Assembly of God minister. He has friends who are missionaries. They believe, he said in an apparent dig at the sanctuary movement, in helping impoverished people in their own countries, not helping them across the border.

Raised in Wilmington, Ezell was president of his junior high school, president of his senior class and lettered in four sports. When he graduated from Banning High School, he was voted “most likely to succeed.”

“People who know you’re a minister’s son wonder how you can be so hard-line,” he said. “To me that’s easy to explain. It’s black and white to me. You either obey laws or you don’t. You have laws or you don’t. The Bible tells you to obey laws.”

He said his close relationship with God supported him through two tragedies: one, when his first wife died of a brain tumor; and then again, when his second wife died of lupus. He has two college-age daughters he speaks of often, and has now been married to his third wife, Lee, for 12 years.

Unlike his counterparts in the other four INS regions, Ezell never graduated from college. He went into business and eventually became a Der Wienerschnitzel executive. He said he has since sold his interests in the chain.

Role in Politics

Ezell became active in Republican politics for the first time during Ronald Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign, setting up his Wilmington campaign office. Reagan won in heavily Democratic Wilmington. When the new governor went to Sacramento, he named to his cabinet the INS’ Nelson and Edwin Meese III, who had become Ezell’s friends and political allies.

After Reagan became President, both men followed him to Washington.

Ezell’s office is a testimony to the men who put him there and the mandate he says they gave him.

There are at least four signed photos of Meese, the U.S. attorney general, and several personal messages of thanks from Reagan for his campaign work. There is a smattering of fan photos from celebrities like singer Pat Boone, a close friend Ezell met through his church. There is a bumper sticker that reads: “The Indians had bad immigration laws.”

“I treasure more than anything else except for some pictures of the President and things,” Ezell says almost ingenuously, “a letter I got from (Sen. Alan) Simpson (D-Wyo.), saying I want to commend you for what you’re doing. I think he’s as close to my hero Abraham Lincoln as anybody in Congress today.”

Would Lincoln Agree?

Simpson has led the fight for immigration reform in the Senate. As for Lincoln, Ezell was born on his birthday in 1937. In answer to the obvious question, Ezell says no, that even the anti-slavery President would not have sympathized with the current underground railroad for Central American immigrants.

“He was not standing for the bringing in of people to this country,” Ezell said, “(but) for people that were here, that had their rights to be people and not to be objects.”

When Ezell told his old friend Nelson that he would agree to take the regional INS job, he said: “I told Nelson that someone needs to be talking, telling the story. Someone needs to be pro-active. Not reactive, pro-active.”

Ezell is on the offensive constantly. His weapon of choice is the media. While some media have editorialized against his stands on issues, no INS official in memory has been more open to the press.

He has flown up and down the state, holding up to three regional press conferences a day. He has called up television crews and invited them on INS operations.

Change of Attitude

That is a dramatic turnaround from previous INS administrations here. INS agents, trained to avoid a press they considered out to get them, have had trouble getting used to him.

“That was the same problem James Watt had,” Ezell said, recounting a favorite anecdote. “You know he told me once that photographers shoot so many pictures because they’re looking for the one that makes you look the worst? How do you expect anyone to get your word out if you feel like that?”

Ezell’s media campaign does not stop at seeking publicity. It also extends to encouraging his agents to go after illegal aliens and their defenders who take advantage of the media themselves.

When illegal aliens win the lottery, for example, Ezell’s agents apprehend them. When a Salvadoran spoke before the City Council in the recent debate on the sanctuary issue, Ezell vowed immediately to check on his immigration status and deport him if he had no papers.

When a Spanish-language radio station began broadcasting a heart-wrenching program in which Central Americans and Mexicans called in to find their missing relatives in the United States, Ezell fired off a letter condemning the idea and asking them (unsuccessfully) to take it off the air.

Concerned About Image

INS Los Angeles District Director Ernest Gustafson recalled in an interview what Ezell told him when he transferred him from his post in Phoenix to Los Angeles for a few years.

“He said, ‘I want the image,’ ” Gustafson recalled. “He even quoted Times’ articles about INS that had not been positive. He told me he would give me all the support I needed to improve the image, including cutting the backlogs, including a higher visibility of enforcement in the community.”

In Los Angeles, where demands are heaviest, anyone who needed virtually anything from the INS had to wait hours to even ask a question, and often years to process an immigration petition.

In a recent turnabout largely attributed to Ezell’s management skills, the Los Angeles district office reduced the local wait for naturalization to a few months. Gustafson also created a bilingual service center that has drastically reduced, if not eliminated, lines at the office.

Hard-Line Approach

Because most INS policies are set in Washington, Ezell has relatively little control over his $150-million budget for his 3,000-employee operation. But, where possible, he has stressed what immigration agents describe as a law enforcement approach.

He has sent investigators to training schools to learn electronic surveillance, thereby increasing covert investigations (such as the sanctuary case) throughout the region. And he is now proposing to arm all INS agents at the border crossing in San Ysidro.

He also has played hardball with deportation and detention procedures and has encouraged staff attorneys to fight hard against several current lawsuits that seek to make it mandatory for INS to apprise aliens of certain rights before they are deported.

In one move criticized as an attempt to use kids as “bait” for their illegal alien parents, he initiated a policy that allows the release of children only to their parents or legal guardians.

Takes to the Field

He makes a practice of accompanying agents on routine missions. Following one investigator to a college to remove an Iranian student who had failed to leave even after exhausting his court appeals, Ezell asked: “Doesn’t it feel fabulous to finally get one and really move him out?”

“It’s almost like he wishes he’d been a cop,” one career agent said. “He’ll just call you up sometimes when you’re in the field and want you to meet him for an operation somewhere.”

Two philosophies prevail inside the INS as to how best to attack the illegal alien problem with limited budgets. One is to go for the numbers, hit the targets that yield the most illegal aliens. The other rejects that notion in the belief that it does little good because most illegals will be back soon anyhow.

Ezell fits into camp No. 1. At one point early in his term, he was harshly criticized by his peers at a management round table for detaining so many aliens that INS was going to be forced to dip into their budgets.

When INS opened a new office in San Jose last year, Ezell angered everyone from Silicon Valley businessmen to the chief of police by declaring that 25% of all the workers in the area were illegal aliens, and that the INS was going after them.

A Tactful Reference

“We left the impression that we were going to weed out all the illegals from the Valley,” a San Jose supervisor, John Senko, recalled recently in an interview. Tactfully, he used the first person plural.

The problem, he said: the INS office had only four investigators at the time and much of San Jose “didn’t want us weeding out illegal aliens anyway.” Moreover, Senko himself prefers employer cooperation programs to massive roundups.

Ezell, who went to San Jose two weeks ago partly to give Senko an engraved replica of the Statue of Liberty in honor of the “duress” the office had undergone since its opening, said his 25% figure was “misconstrued.”

Then, he turned to Senko, and asked: “You did turn up about 25% illegals of the people you surveyed, didn’t you, John?”

“It was 6 1/2% to 8%,” Senko replied. Its actual number was 60.

Ezell is not known for his precision.

‘Ambiguous’ Reference

At his recent press conference denouncing sanctuary for Salvadorans as illegal and unnecessary, he said “groups such as Amnesty International, who had once claimed mass murder of (Salvadoran) deportees, have reversed themselves.”

Amnesty International, it turned out, had made no such statements. Ezell took the comment from a press release that his public affairs officer, John Belluardo, said he took from a newspaper editorial that he acknowledged during the interview was “ambiguous.”

At perhaps his biggest press conference so far, Ezell announced in February, 1984, that an INS officer under investigation for mistakenly deporting a 14-year-old legal resident had been cleared of wrongdoing by the INS Office of Professional Responsibility.

Although the officer has since been cleared, the investigation was not over when Ezell spoke. Ezell said he had called the news conference to back up his officer. His point, he said, was to say the agent had been cleared of the specific allegation of physically abusing the youth. He insists he told reporters that the overall investigation was continuing.

The upshot: Ezell himself underwent a months-long investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

“They felt that I had misrepresented the fact that the investigation was closed,” he said. “The press release was technically off. It did leave a feeling that the investigation was completed.”

Such details are admittedly not Ezell’s forte. But everywhere he goes, the outgoing commissioner meets people who provide common sense evidence that supports his underlying contention: that illegal immigration is the root of many U.S. problems and it must be stopped.

He chances upon a federal Treasury agent in a parking lot who remarks that a third of his cases of illegal weapons possession involve illegal aliens. He chats with a traffic cop while getting a shoeshine, and is told that a third of all his uninsured motorist citations speak only Spanish and therefore are probably illegal aliens.

Such stories become part of the repertoire of tales he tells and retells when he gives officials and friends tours of the border. It is this tour that he thinks is his best tool in winning converts and he gives it often: to congressmen, officials, to union leaders he once saw complain on news telecasts about illegal aliens’ wages, and to just plain friends.

“I’ve exposed some very important people to the problem at the border, hoping that they will start an ABC, Americans for Border Control, or something like that,” he said. “I believe there needs to be a grass-roots organization spring up. If we can get mad about drunk drivers, why can’t we get mad about regaining our borders?”

“The reason why you have control of immigration is that you can assimilate a certain number of people every year into your culture, into the American way, into America, America’s life style. If you flood or you overdose your culture or your society then you have chaos, you don’t have a culture anymore.

“And that’s really what’s happening in a growing way. Already, you need to know Spanish to navigate your way around downtown.”

A few of his most angry opponents--including some Orange County Latino leaders who once demanded his resignation--have accused him of inciting racism.

A Critic’s Viewpoint

Sister Armida Deck, head of the Hispanic Ministry of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, accused Ezell of creating a “sense of Latino invasion of Southern California” with his dire predictions.

“That’s a cheap shot to accuse me of racism,” Ezell responded, reddening with anger. “You can’t grow up where I did, have the friends I do, and be a racist.”

In fact, he said, he plans to work harder at persuading more Latino and black leaders of his mission because, he says, it is their constituents he figures lose the most jobs to illegal aliens.

“With God’s help,” he said, “I’ll have enough strength to keep in here fighting until immigration reform is law.”