Washington Not Alerted to Palestinian Arrests, Agent Says

A top Los Angeles investigator for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said a concern for confidentiality resulted in a communications lapse during which top INS officials in Washington did not learn about the arrests last month of a group of Palestinian immigrants until after they occurred.

“The arrests probably did surprise (Washington),” the investigator, Richard Hugg, said of the Jan. 26 Los Angeles area arrests.

“I have to accept responsibility for that,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “It was a misjudgment on our part on the need for confidentiality. We were overly concerned about leaks. I took the initiative to apologize (to Washington) for this. We should have done a better job of informing (Washington) in advance.”

Reflecting on the case, Hugg, 39, assistant INS regional commissioner for investigations, said: “This is a very important case because of the nature of the charges relating to the security of the United States. The evidence will show very clearly (the defendants’) involvement.” He declined to elaborate.

The eight defendants were ordered released from federal prison Tuesday after an immigration judge turned down a government request to keep them in prison until their deportation hearing in April. The immigrants are facing deportation over accusations that they belong to a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization that has a violent history.

After congressional requests and a meeting Tuesday with former U.S. Sen. James G. Abourezk, chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson asked for a report on the sequence of events leading up to the arrests.

Such a report has been forwarded to Nelson, Ernest Gustafson, the INS Los Angeles district director, said Thursday.

A Washington spokesman for the INS, Duke Austin, underscored that Nelson’s request was a courtesy to Abourezk and to some members of Congress interested in the widely publicized case.

“It’s not an investigation,” Austin said in a telephone interview. “Nelson said after the meeting (with Abourezk) that ‘I’ll collect the facts.’ That doesn’t mean there’s a probe.”