Making It Legal : Diocese Gears Up to Help Aliens With Amnesty Applications

When the federal government begins accepting amnesty applications from illegal aliens in May, many of Orange County’s estimated 100,000 undocumented immigrants are expected to apply through Catholic Charities, the social services arm of the Diocese of Orange.

But while the new immigration law represents a great opportunity for the agency to help bring thousands out of the shadows, it is also placing great demands on the agency’s resources.

“The INS people say, ‘Don’t worry about it, the Catholics will take care of it,’ ” said Ted McCabe, Catholic Charities’ immigration lawyer, standing in front of an office calendar crowded with court dates. “But who is that? It’s four or five people in this hall.”

McCabe, a graduate of Loyola Law School, no longer accepts new deportation cases and petitions for legal residency--his full-time responsibility until now--because of the huge workload the new law has brought with it. “That’s very painful to me,” said McCabe, whose clients usually cannot afford the services of a private immigration attorney.

Since December, McCabe and legalization coordinator Jennifer Winburn have been barnstorming the county’s parishes, educating potential amnesty applicants and training volunteers, who, they hope, will do much of the legwork in preparing the applications. With the program just getting under way, the agency already has opened files for 5,000 prospective applicants--half the number the church thinks it could effectively handle.

“We estimate that there are about 50,000 to 60,000 undocumented (aliens) in Orange County who would be eligible to apply,” said Sister Kristan Schlichte, acting director of Catholic Charities. “And we figure that we can process 10,000.”

The rest, the agency hopes, will be served by immigration officials, private lawyers and other low-cost, nonprofit agencies. So far, however, Catholic Charities is the only nonprofit agency in Orange County that has begun to develop a legalization program.

Schlichte said the agency hopes to hire 15 additional immigration counselors and establish six centers in various parts of the county. The churches where the centers would be located have not yet been selected, she said.

To pay for what the agency staff estimates may be a $600,000 program, Catholic Charities will ask each applicant for a $100 donation. “In the past, our clients have been generous,” Schlichte said. “We hope the program will pay for itself.”

Next week, Schlichte and the agency’s associate director, Father Jaime Soto, who is supervising the legalization program, will fly to Las Vegas to meet with the diocese’s new bishop, the Most Rev. Norman F. McFarland. Among other things, they will ask the bishop for permission to raise funds for the program throughout the diocese.

McFarland, bishop of the Reno-Las Vegas Diocese, said in a telephone interview that he was not yet familiar with the specific needs of the Orange County program. But, he said, he was very interested in the program and wants “to make sure that we are geared up properly.”

“We want to assist these people, with a good program,” McFarland said. “It’s not only a matter of evangelization, but (also of) offering assistance in a very sensitive area. . . . People have suffered a lot through this.”

Gather Documentation

Crucial to the agency’s success in shepherding 10,000 people through the immigration bureaucracy will be a network of 500 to 1,000 parish volunteers, Schlichte said. The agency’s hope is that each applicant, with the help of a volunteer in his or her parish, will have gathered most of the documentation necessary to prove their eligibility for legal residence before they are interviewed by an immigration counselor, Schlichte said.

“That’s the only way we could hope to process that many,” she said.

One evening last week, Winburn took her orientation speech to the St. Isidore Mission in Los Alamitos to recruit more volunteers. A half-dozen people showed up, plus the parish priest, Father John Paul Hopping.

Winburn took them through each step of the new law, explaining the requirements for legal residency: a clean criminal record, evidence that one is unlikely to require welfare or other public assistance and, most importantly, proof of continuous residence in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982.

Any Type of Proof

“Whatever proof they can gather to show that they’ve been here since Jan. 1, 1982,” Winburn said, in fluent Spanish. “Employment records, gas and electricity bills. . . . Maybe they’ve had a baby here every year since then.”

“Tell me about it,” joked volunteer Estela Guardado.

“I’m volunteering because I want to help these people get their papers,” said Guardado, a native of Mexico who came to this country 28 years ago. She has been a parish member for 26 years. “A lot of the people here won’t be eligible, though--they came here after 1982.”

At other parishes, Winburn said, some of the volunteers are illegal aliens, prospective amnesty applicants themselves. Altogether, she said, more than 100 people have volunteered to help so far. “We need more,” she said.