INS Labels Terrorist Emergency Proposal Just ‘an Option Paper’

A federal blueprint for stepped-up surveillance and swift apprehension of immigrants with possible ties to terrorist groups--including the use of CIA intelligence and a Louisiana detention facility to house suspected terrorists--is nothing more than “staff input, an option paper,” a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said Friday.

“It’s material being used to draft a contingency plan,” the spokesman, Duke Austin, said in a telephone interview from Washington. “Its roots go back to the Iranian hostage situation.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service noted in the plan that in the case of a domestic terrorist emergency, “the mission of the INS will be to . . . locate, apprehend and remove a body of aliens from the U.S.”

Austin also said an interagency group that received the proposals from the INS is continuing to meet actively on anti-terrorism strategy.

Possible Restrictions

The conceivably far-reaching proposals, which also call for possible restrictions on U.S. citizens traveling abroad, caused concern among some members of Congress.

“If they (the Reagan Administration) think they’re going to do this without intense congressional scrutiny, they’re wrong,” said Julian Epstein, a spokesman for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of a House subcommittee on criminal justice.

The anti-terrorist package has angered civil rights activists who view it as the impetus for the arrests last week in Los Angeles of a group of Arab immigrants for allegedly engaging in subversive activities linked to a militant faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Although the 31-page report, drafted last May by the INS’ Investigations Division for a group called the Alien Border Control Committee, has several references to Arab immigrants, it does not specifically call for tighter controls on one particular ethnic bloc.

The report, disclosed Friday by The Times, is titled, “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan.” But Austin said it was not a contingency plan, just “an option paper.”

Group Meeting

According to the documents, the group’s first meeting was held last Sept. 17. The group is composed of representatives from the Justice Department, including the FBI, and the CIA, U.S. Customs Service and the State Department.

Recent violent acts of terrorism have been minimal in this country, according to terrorist experts. A notable exception was the October, 1985, fatal bombing of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Santa Ana office in which Regional Director Alex M. Odeh was killed. The case remains unsolved.

Austin said the committee’s roots go back to the November, 1979, crisis when the U.S. Embassy staff in Iran was taken hostage. At that time, he recalled, it took the Justice Department the better part of a year to compile a list of Iranian immigrants in this country.

But then the INS began using computers for such information and, he said, it took less than an hour to determine how many Libyan immigrants were in the United States after the 1981 scare over the possibility of Libyan “hit squads” sneaking into the country.

Austin declined to say which of the report’s recommendations were still being advanced, declaring,”You don’t tell (terrorists) how you’re going to respond.”

Among the report’s recommendations were:

- A presidential executive order allowing the INS to receive “evidence relating to alien undesirables and suspected terrorists” in the United States from the CIA, FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. The CIA is barred from purely domestic surveillance.

- Incarceration of suspected terrorists “upon information or intelligence that aliens in numbers in the range of 500-1,000 are to be apprehended,” in the INS’ 100-acre Oakdale, La., Alien Detention Center.

Austin, however, said this is not possible because the center currently is packed with “Marielitos” Cubans, a reference to thousands of boat people who in 1980 left Cuba’s Mariel Harbor seeking U.S. asylum.

- “A wholesale registry and processing procedure” involving invalidation of visas so that aliens of a “nationality group” would have to re-register with the government for purposes of monitoring them in an emergency.

- Limiting travel of U.S. citizens leaving or entering the country during a terrorist emergency. According to the documents, the INS explored this idea as far back as December, 1984.

- A series of changes that would affect immigrants facing deportation, including “routinely” holding aliens in prison, pending a hearing, without bail, as is the case with seven of the immigrants arrested here who are awaiting bond and deportation hearings later this month.