INS Calls for Watchdog Panel for Reform Law

Pledging that immigration offices will not become a “sting operation,” the western regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service called Wednesday for an advisory group to monitor his agency’s implementation of the new immigration law.

Harold Ezell, who was appointed to his position by President Reagan in 1983, said the group would not be “a police review board” overseeing the INS but would meet periodically to “see how (the implementation of the new law) is going, to see if there are problems. . . . We don’t have all the answers ourselves.”

The group, to be made up of 12 to 15 private citizens and public officials, would include critics as well as supporters of INS policies and practices, Ezell said.

“They’re not all going to be pro folks who think we’re wonderful,” said Ezell. He named the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Catholic Church as groups critical of the INS in the past that might be asked to send representatives to the advisory group. “They don’t have to agree with me . . . as long as they’re objective and they don’t come in with a hidden agenda,” he said.

Ezell’s announcement came at a daylong conference at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel on the new Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The conference was sponsored by the INS.

The law, which became effective last November, will enable many illegal aliens who have resided in the United States continuously since Jan. 1, 1982, to obtain legal-resident status. It also imposes federal sanctions for the first time on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.

The INS will not begin accepting amnesty applications until May and will not issue citations to employers until June. In the meantime, the agency has been trying to make available the latest information on the new law to employers as well as to groups representing illegal aliens. Wednesday’s conference was the 10th that the INS has conducted in the western region--California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii--and it plans to hold more.

Ezell’s announcement is in keeping with what has appeared to be a conscious effort by the INS to convince the Latino community, a large part of which has long been distrustful of the immigration agency, that it does not intend to use the new law as a way to deport more illegal aliens.

“During the Olympics, the slogan was ‘L.A.’s the place,’ ” Ezell said. “Well, L.A.’s the place for legalization, too. The INS offices will not be a sting operation.”

Among those Ezell said he will probably ask to become members of the group are former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso and Reps. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach), Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles) and Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City).

Reynoso, a speaker at Wednesday’s conference, endorsed the concept and said he would be interested in becoming a member of the advisory group but may have “another role to play” in the implementation of the new law. He declined to elaborate, saying it was “premature” to make any announcement.

One of three state Supreme Court Justices voted out of office last November, Reynoso said that he often had been critical of the INS and that he had opposed the idea of penalizing employers who hire illegal aliens.

“But now that that’s the law, we have to be concerned that it’s implemented in the proper spirit . . . of non-discrimination,” he said.

Reynoso said he agreed to speak to the 600 people who attended the conference--most of them employers, immigration attorneys or representatives of church or social service agencies--because he wanted to share with them his sense “that INS officials really seem to be serious, particularly with implementing the legalization part of the law. . . . I was really impressed by the openness of Mr. Ezell . . . and the INS.”

Amin David, an outspoken critic of Ezell who is president of Los Amigos, an Orange County Latino businessmen’s group, said the advisory group concept is “unprecedented. I look with favor to something like that . . . provided it has the necessary teeth to it and won’t be a rubber stamp.”

Gene Smith, a spokeswoman for Berman, said the congressman would “really have to see what sort of function he (Ezell) had in mind for the group” before sending a representative.

Lungren, who helped guide the immigration bill through Congress last fall, said he would “be pleased” to have one of his staff members on the group. “I want to make sure the bill works,” he said.

As Wednesday’s conference was ending, about 75 demonstrators from the Orange County chapter of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (National Mexican Brotherhood) entered the hotel chanting “Visas si! Despidos no!” (Visas yes! Firings no!).

The group’s leader, Nativo Lopez, charged that the INS has ignored the problem of employers dismissing illegal aliens who qualify for amnesty and challenged Ezell to do something about it.

Ezell, on his way out of the hotel when he was confronted by the demonstrators, called the demonstration “a publicity stunt” but told Lopez that if he furnished him with the names of employers unjustly dismissing Latino workers he would personally look into the matter.

Lopez said he would make the names of the firms public in a few days “after we decide which employers to target.”