Catholics and INS : New Laws on Immigrants Split Church

In the weeks since enactment of the new immigration reform law, a lawsuit called Catholic Social Services et al vs. Edwin Meese III has been a major irritant to officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson described as “outrageous” the first court order emerging from the lawsuit, filed in Sacramento by a coalition of immigrant rights groups. That order, involving deportation rules, has been appealed and the legal battle over interpretation of the law continues.

Yet even while Catholic organizations serve as advocates for immigrants in disputes with the INS, the Catholic Church is gearing up nationwide to cooperate with the federal agency in processing hundreds of thousands of applications from illegal aliens seeking legal residence under the new law.

‘A Dual Role’

“It’s a dual role,” said Dolores Castillo, who heads legalization planning for the Sacramento diocese and also directs the church center that joined the lawsuit against the INS. “There is a balancing act that one has to handle properly.”

Thus, the law--which offers amnesty to some illegal residents and farm workers but imposes penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens--poses a touchy challenge to a church that traditionally has championed the rights of immigrants and refugees.

Already, it has touched off heated debate within the church about how illegal aliens are best served. In many respects, the disagreements reflect long-simmering differences between mainstream prelates and activists who want the church to be a “sanctuary” for immigrants.

1 Million May Apply

Officials of the U.S. Catholic Conference, which is coordinating the massive effort, have estimated that at least 1 million people--about 65% of all applicants--will apply for legal residence through Catholic-operated centers.

Some dioceses are planning to ask applicants to go to central processing centers, while others envision more aggressive grass-roots campaigns. In Brooklyn, the church will have fingerprinting equipment and cameras at individual parishes. In rural Texas, mobile units will serve people whose route to the nearest legalization center is blocked by a Border Patrol highway checkpoint.

Even with wide use of volunteers, the church’s expenses could run upwards of $100 million. The church hopes to cover its costs from fees paid by applicants and partial reimbursement by the government, supplemented by local contributions. But some dioceses--Orange County, for one--fear that their efforts will be hampered by lack of funds.

The Catholic Church has worked closely with the federal government for decades to assist in refugee resettlement and church officials experienced in this field are now largely concerned with processing as many amnesty applications as possible.

Some activists inside and outside the church, however, worry that the very immensity of the church effort may draw it away from what they view as the equally important task of providing legal defense for illegal aliens denied amnesty.

Catholic Charities, which will run the church’s legalization effort in Los Angeles, has until now mainly focused on preparing to process tens of thousands of applications. An “advocacy component” announced by the agency has yet to be clarified, said Father Joe Pina, a member of an advisory task force on legalization.

Pina maintains that Catholic Charities must be forcefully involved in advocacy, or else “we would have to ask ourselves whether we are just an arm of INS, just a processing plant. And I don’t believe that’s our role.”

Cut Across Lines

Support for helping illegal aliens to apply for legal residence appears to cut across conservative-liberal divisions within the church.

Francis Maier, editor of the conservative Los Angeles-based National Catholic Register, said that “even most conservative Catholics would support the idea of showing compassion to people who come across the border.”

Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony, in a recent pastoral letter on immigration, called for solidarity in assisting refugees and immigrants, terming their presence “a challenge to our Catholic community” to “live fully the catholicity of our Church.”

He cautioned against giving into fear, which he said has spawned phrases such as “an invasion from the south.”

“Immigrants and refugees teach us that the sufferings and needs of the world touch us directly, and that we cannot remain an island of security and wealth,” he said.

“There is good will all over the place,” said Father Gregory Boyle, pastor at Dolores Mission Church, one of the poorest in East Los Angeles, as he described discussions among church officials and pastors from predominantly Latino parishes. “But knowing what to do (to protect the rights of the undocumented) is the issue. . . . A big question is how the advocacy component is going to be played out.”

Criticism in L.A.

Differences over the church’s role have been especially sharp in Los Angeles, where criticism has focused on the Immigration and Citizenship Division of Catholic Charities.

Immigrant rights groups who fought passage of the law and have traditionally had an adversary relationship with the INS question Catholic Charities’ ability to be a strong advocate for immigrants in light of its traditional cooperation with the INS in government-funded resettlement programs.

In a pointed example that reflects the differing perspectives, several members of a newly formed coalition of more than 30 immigrant rights, community, labor and church groups recalled with dismay that Elizabeth Kirsnis, director of the Immigration and Citizenship Division, showed up at the group’s first meeting with an INS official as her guest.

“As closely linked as we will be with INS, we have to maintain a distance to the extent possible,” said coalition member Boyle, whose congregation recently declared its church a sanctuary for illegal aliens who fail to qualify for amnesty. “I want my parishioners to perceive the program as a church, not a migra (INS) program.”

Although Catholic Charities has joined the coalition, it is a “reluctant member” viewed by others as “an entrenched institution--almost fossilized--and very resistant to change,” said Linda Wong of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Caught by Surprise

Kirsnis, the Catholic Charities’ immigration director, said the conflict caught her by surprise.

“I’d love the luxury of sitting down . . . and have us all come to a consensus,” she said. But Kirsnis said she has a massive program to get off the ground before the INS starts accepting legalization applications on May 5.

Pointing out that she has 24 years of experience in the immigration field, Kirsnis dismisses much of the criticism from other relative “newcomers” as “naive.”

Kirsnis said she does not “minimize the need for advocacy,” but noted that her agency has helped hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years. While others debate the implications of the law, she is doing something “positive” to help as many as possible benefit from it, she said.

Msgr. Nicholas DiMarzio, who as director of Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Catholic Conference is the church’s chief negotiator with the INS, said that although there have been differences of opinion within the church, “we are evolving toward consensus.”

Cooperating With INS

“We are cooperating with INS,” DiMarzio said, “but we’re cooperating only because we want to serve our clients.”

U.S. Catholic Conference work with immigrants has roots dating back to 1919. Its predecessor, the National Catholic Welfare Council, launched a national campaign to help refugees from World War I, according to Father Silvano Tomasi, director of pastoral care for migrants and refugees.

The current legalization effort, he said, “is simply a logical development and a logical follow-up to what has gone on in the last 60 or 70 years.”

Rudolph Vecoli, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, said the Catholic Church is well-positioned to help with the new law because it enjoys the trust of large numbers of illegal aliens and has a national structure reaching deep into local communities.

“The basic requirement for the success of the program is to convince people to come out from under cover, and this requires that they have confidence in the institutions they’re dealing with,” Vecoli said. “It is reasonable to think the church will have a major role, perhaps a dominant role in this.”

Duty of the Church

Some activists--especially those who opposed the bill--say that because the National Conference of Catholic Bishops supported some aspects of the law and did not oppose passage, the church has a special duty to do all it can to help illegal aliens affected by it.

The bishops “could have stopped the law and they didn’t,” said Father Luis Olivares, pastor at Our Lady Queen of Angels in Los Angeles. “The church now has the responsibility to make the law work for the maximum number of people.”

In negotiating with the INS over terms of a cooperative agreement, the U.S. Catholic Conference is working with other organizations that also expect to process applications. Included in this group are Church World Service, which has a network of 40 Protestant-supported immigration centers throughout the country, and the American Council for Nationalities Service, with 33 affiliated service agencies that in most cities are called International Institutes.

After consultation with these various groups, the INS plans to publish an agreement that will govern its relationship with all voluntary agencies, according to Duke Austin, an INS spokesman in Washington.

Agencies will pass completed applications on to the INS, which generally will issue temporary work authorization cards within a few days, Austin said.

DiMarzio said he foresees signing of an agreement in March but that if negotiations were to come to an impasse, coalition members might tell sympathetic members of Congress that legalization “is impossible to implement under the conditions set forth.”

In the negotiations, one issue has been what rules will govern voluntary agency assistance to clients appealing denied applications. Austin said last week that the only planned restriction is that reimbursement money not be used to finance appeals.

Austin added that the agency expects to approve computer-compatible application forms, which Catholic Conference officials have requested so they can computerize their operations.

Another key concern of many church officials is how restrictive will be the regulations that define who is eligible for amnesty.

To qualify, illegal aliens must be able to prove that they have lived in the United States since before Jan. 1, 1982, or have spent at least 90 days performing “seasonal agricultural services” in this country in the 12-month period that ended May 1, 1986.

The law states that those applying for amnesty under the pre-1982 residence category are not disqualified by “brief and casual” trips out of the country, but the exact meaning of those words has yet to be defined.

Implementation Worries

“There is a great deal of preoccupation on the part of some of us who are legalization directors on how they’re going to implement the regulations, the nitty-gritty details of the process,” said Francisco Dominguez, director of immigrant services for the New York Archdiocese. “It could be implemented in a horribly oppressive, legalistic, restrictive way.”

Church leaders also worry that many families will find some members winning legalization while others fail to qualify.

“The bill itself, the way it is written, is rather anti-family,” said Bryan Walsh, executive director of Catholic Community Services for the Miami Archdiocese. “A husband might qualify and it might be 10 years before his wife qualifies.”

DiMarzio said some INS officials have indicated that the agency might give a kind of quasi-legal status to illegal spouses of legalized aliens that would enable them to avoid deportation.

James Hoffman, Western regional director of Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Catholic Conference, said he believes that, intellectually, INS officials want legalization to work, as they have repeatedly stated. But some who have spent years catching and expelling illegal aliens may have a visceral feeling of not really wanting it to work too well, he said. “This bill goes counter to what many of them have lived for,” he said.

Spotlight on L.A.

Because of this, “The most important aspect in the development of legalization regulations is that the Immigration and Naturalization Service allows their pen to go where their mouth has already gone,” Hoffman said.

As the church gears up to help implement the law, the spotlight is on Los Angeles, not only because it is believed to be home to roughly one-third of the illegal aliens in the country, but also because of Archbishop Mahony’s national reputation as a champion of Latino causes.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese has the most advanced planning in the country, according to church officials. It is preparing to handle a projected 250,000 amnesty applications through about 20 processing centers tentatively scheduled to open in March. The church plans to hire about 200 people, as well as recruit many more volunteers, to operate the centers.

These plans may change, officials said, depending on what they learn from the response at about 120 registration sites that have already drawn more than 50,000 potential amnesty applicants.

Olivares, whose historic downtown church, best known as La Placita, was the first in the archdiocese to declare itself a sanctuary for Central American refugees, contends that the church has underestimated the number of applicants. He dismissed the tentative 250,000 projection as “ridiculous . . . a drop in the bucket.”

4 Million Nationwide

Los Angeles County officials have estimated that 800,000 illegal aliens in the county may win legal residence. INS officials have estimated that the number of applications could exceed 1 million in Los Angeles County alone and reach close to 4 million nationwide.

The legalization program in Los Angeles will be “geared to the norm--the normal person who is going to receive the benefit of the law,” Kirsnis said. The church will try to screen out time-consuming cases by referring those applications to attorneys willing to provide free or reduced-rate service, but will provide legal services for those clients it accepts, she said.

The choice for the church is between “devoting 40 hours to one case, or taking 40 cases at one hour apiece,” Kirsnis said.

Some Catholic agencies, however, intend to put greater emphasis on advocacy.

Catholic Charities in San Francisco, anticipating that the law will hurt more of its constituents than it will help, plans to focus more effort on defending immigrants against the INS than on working with the agency on legalization, according to Patrice Perillie, director of the agency’s immigration program.

Setting Priorities

“If the choice comes down to processing legalization applications or providing defense and emergency services for refugees, our priority will be on the person who would be on the street without our help,” Perillie said.

Program officials anticipate that most of the area’s estimated 60,000 Central American refugees will not qualify for amnesty because many arrived after the 1982 cutoff date. They also predict that joblessness will skyrocket among refugees as they begin to feel the effects of the law’s employer sanctions.

The church agency has launched a massive education campaign in conjunction with the local immigrant rights coalition, conducting seminars and distributing hundreds of thousands of flyers advising illegal aliens about the new law, officials said.

In Los Angeles, the immigrant rights coalition maintains that Catholic Charities has not been aggressive enough in advising aliens how to protect themselves. The coalition is appealing directly to Mahony for permission to allow its members to speak at local parishes and urging him to place a higher priority on legal defense.

Kirsnis has said she does not anticipate a critical need for legal defense until, possibly, later on in the legalization process, when immigrants begin applying for permanent residency.

Parish-Level Classes

Among the requirements at that stage, aliens must show that they either have a minimal understanding of English and American civics or are enrolled in an approved course of study. Some dioceses plan to offer parish-level English and civics courses while others, including Los Angeles, have yet to address the issue.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese has received a pledge of about $200,000 a year for at least three years from an anonymous donor that will be used to help defray the costs of the legalization program, Kirsnis said.

In addition to paying an application fee to the INS that may run about $100, applicants will also be charged a church service fee. DiMarzio has said he hopes that nationally the church can keep this fee below $100 for an individual or family, with a sliding scale based on income. Church officials in Los Angeles are contemplating a $50 fee.

Kirsnis said that if the fee, together with the projected INS reimbursement of about $15 or $20, proves insufficient to cover expenditures, “the archdiocese is committed to assisting with costs.”

Since each diocese is responsible for financing its own program, the scope of programs may vary widely. In Orange County, for instance, the diocese is gearing up to serve about 10,000 immigrants, or as little as 10% of the area’s estimated illegal immigrant population.

Need More Resources

“Unless we get a lot more resources than we have now, we can’t afford to address the total population,” said Dorothy Brylski, director of the immigration and resettlement program for the diocese’s Catholic Charities. Brylski said that if the church cannot run a larger program, many illegal aliens may have to file applications directly with the INS.

But Hoffman said the Catholic Conference will do all it can to ensure that Catholic agencies throughout the country can fulfill their role as “the major legalizer” under the new law.

“It is our evangelical mandate,” he said.