INS Displays Hardhearted Zeal

Victor Amador Garcia, 13, who lived in Orange until several days ago, is in the custody of Mexican juvenile authorities. Victor is no juvenile delinquent. He’s in custody in Mexico, and his mother is in anguish in Orange, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in its hardhearted zeal to rid the nation of one more illegal immigrant, snatched the youth off his bike and dumped him back across the border.

According to the INS, the boy got in the way of a sweep of undocumented workers in Orange by yelling warnings that INS vans were approaching. So they swept him up, too.

That’s not the way Victor tells it. He says he was on his bike on the way to buy candy before going to school and that he didn’t shout anything at anyone.

We don’t know who’s right. But we know who’s wrong.

The INS, in countless other cases of enforcing the law inefficiently and without a scintilla of human compassion, has maintained that it is protecting the jobs of American workers by running sweeps of undocumented workers and deporting them.

But whose job is saved by swooping down on a 13-year-old boy? Where’s the humanity and common-sense of deporting a youngster to Mexico while his family remains here, wondering why he never came home from school?

Victor isn’t the only young man from Orange County to suffer the insensitivity of the INS. Joeri DeBeer, an 18-year-old native of the Netherlands, faces a deportation hearing next month because, the INS charges, he committed a crime of “moral turpitude.” Judging from court records, DeBeer was a victim of “moral turpitude.”

The case in the Orange County courts last June drew national attention. DeBeer killed his guardian after years of being sexually abused. The jurors convicted him of manslaughter, not murder, and then turned around and begged Judge Robert Fitzgerald not to send him to jail.

DeBeer, who was brought to this country by his guardian when he was 13, was put on probation. He relocated to Northern California, where he was living with his new court-appointed guardians and attending community college on a trust fund set up by one of the jurors.

DeBeer’s moral character is good enough for a judge, jury and the congressman who helped win a continuance of the deportation hearing. DeBeer’s attorney is trying to get the INS to withdraw the deportation order on “humanitarian grounds.” A little humanity in INS operations is long overdue.

No wonder many illegal aliens and employers are leery of working with the INS on the new immigration law.

There’s no doubt that many people in our country don’t legally belong here and deserve deportation. But some cases, like those of Victor Amador Garcia and Joeri DeBeer, deserve compassion.