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 has called 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 that 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 last week at a daylong conference in Anaheim 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 the 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.”