Aliens Fear Massive Deportations : At El Paso Border, Rumor Mill Is the Biggest Worry

The telephones at radio stations in this border city began ringing like crazy earlier this year, after the announcements were broadcast. The callers wanted to know if they were being lured into an unwanted bus ride to Mexico, compliments of the U.S. government.

Their fear: that a highly publicized series of “town hall” meetings to discuss new immigration laws was really a sting operation to round up illegal aliens.

After all, some of the callers said, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had pulled this kind of stunt before. Last year, the INS sent letters to illegal aliens telling them they might win a new Ford Bronco if they showed up for a drawing. The 55 illegals who took the bait were deported.

Lessening Distrust

Al Guigni, the district director of the INS, spent a lot of time telling people that the meetings were legitimate, that no one who attended them would be arrested. But it has been slow going.

“Our experience in the past six weeks has been a feeling on the agency’s part that we are beginning to establish credibility and lessen some of the distrust of the past,” Guigni said.

Perhaps so, but the immigration revision package signed into law by President Reagan last November is still the object of suspicion and consternation anywhere there are large pockets of illegal aliens. From Los Angeles to San Diego to San Antonio to Chicago, the story is much the same. But the distrust is especially acute in El Paso, the largest city in the United States on the Mexican border.

Cities Need Each Other

El Paso is both a major crossing for illegal aliens and a place where Mexican nationals, armed with legal border-crossing cards, walk across the bridge into Texas from Juarez each day on their way to work. The two cities need each other and work with each other, making what happens on either side of the border important to both.

The new laws, scheduled to go into effect in less than two months, grant amnesty and legal residence to illegal aliens who have lived continuously in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982. But there are so many unanswered questions and so much bad information going around that thousands of illegal aliens still do not know whether they qualify for legal residence. Guigni is the first to admit he still does not have all the answers because he has not yet been given them by the rule makers in Washington.

“There are a lot of unknowns,” he said. “This is totally uncharted ground.”

Deportations Feared

In Mexico, those unknowns are fueling fears that there will be mass deportations from the United States into a country already bulging with unemployed, and the alarmist reaction seems to increase as the time for the program to begin approaches. In towns on the Mexican side of the border, the press has printed a number of shrill half-truths or untruths.

One report was that Ft. Bliss, just outside El Paso, would be turned into a prison camp this summer to jail massive numbers of undocumented workers. The INS says that is not true.

Front page articles in two of Juarez’s newspapers recently reported there would be “massive deportations” during the summer, while another described how 30 illegal aliens were deported after they went to the INS office to discuss amnesty applications. Again untrue, the INS said.

So serious were matters becoming that Guigni held a joint press conference with the U.S. consul general in Juarez, Mike Hancock, to deny the stories. The fear was that the newspaper accounts would scare off qualified applicants for legal residence.

‘A Lot of Misinformation’

“In the absence of factual information, there has been a lot of misinformation,” Hancock said in an interview. Cottage industries have sprung up, selling booklets on how to gain legal status or forged documents to prove residence in the United States since 1982, he said, and illegal aliens, in some instances, are being told by fast-buck artists to give false information on their applications, despite INS warnings that doing so will lead to immediate disqualification.

But again, he said, the biggest problem is the rumor mill.

“The question that keeps being asked in Mexico is: ‘What about these massive deportations?’ ” Hancock said.

Al Velarde was sitting in the Westin Paso del Norte coffee shop early one morning, listing the problems he sees with the immigration bill. He drinks coffee there almost every morning before going to his office at migration and refugee services of the United States Catholic Conference.

Velarde, the regional director whose territory covers 11 states from the El Paso headquarters, was going over his own set of worries as the deadline for implementing the new laws approaches.

Flood of Applicants

He didn’t think the INS would be ready to handle the flood of applicants. His own organization had already processed 4,700 pre-registered applications that would be turned over to immigration officials on May 6, and there were other groups doing the same thing. He expects 35,000 to 40,000 applicants for legal residence from the El Paso Diocese alone.

What about the agricultural worker, a separate category altogether, who must prove he worked for 90 days during the year in the United States? If he files his preliminary application for legal status here, it will be sent to Dallas for processing and a temporary residence card won’t be ready for 60 to 90 days.

“In the meantime, he’s finished work here and might be in Bakersfield,” Velarde said. “As it stands now, he would have to come back to El Paso to get his residency card.”

Velarde was also worried about how the law might be interpreted for farm workers, just how strict the definition was going to be--whether illegal aliens working, for instance, in the dairy industry might not qualify as agricultural workers. The same could be true, he said, for those who work with sheep, cattle and horses.

Question of Families

And finally, there was the question of families, where some members might qualify easily while other members would not.

“They are afraid to come forward because it will surface the rest of the family,” he said. “There are a lot of question marks. There are a lot who are qualified who won’t come forward.”

Guigni, the immigration director, believes the new laws will work, despite the obstacles.

“This is a benefit for the illegal alien that has never been offered before,” he said. “They need to take advantage of it.”

Guigni has problems of his own, of course. One is trying to get applicants to think about how they can prove they have been in the United States for the last five years. There is the bureaucratic mess of trying to arrange with utilities and telephone companies to look up records of those applying for legal residence. There is the matter of arrested illegal aliens who must file for legal status within 30 days to be eligible. What if the system is so clogged with people and paper work that they cannot? Will there be enough manpower to handle the load?

“It sure is one hell of a challenge,” he said.

River Crossings Continue

Meanwhile, down at the Rio Grande, which separates El Paso from Juarez, it was business as usual. The river was running high because of heavy rains and snow this year, and Border Patrolman Danny Molina drove along the dirt track, watching illegal aliens being ferried across in rubber rafts and oversized inner tubes. This was small-time stuff, not really worth bothering with. He knew it, and so did those crossing. They hardly paid any attention to him.

Molina stopped his van and passed the time with a rafter who was on the U.S. side of the river. Business had been slow. Maybe it was the weather. But the rafter had another complaint.

“The Mexican police keep stopping and they charge me 2,000 pesos to let me keep working,” he said.