Amnesty--Many Aliens Face a 30-Day Deadline to Apply, Don’t Know It

Elias Beltran appeared to be caught in a bind. The 44-year-old illegal alien from Mexico was anxious to file legalization, or amnesty, applications for himself, his wife and two children, but he believed that he had only 30 days to complete the needed forms.

Beltran was having trouble securing appointments with a doctor authorized to conduct the examinations required of amnesty applicants. “We can’t get the medical until the end of the month, and they say it could take a few days to get the results back,” the maintenance worker explained as he waited at a legalization office in San Diego with his wife. “It could be too late by then.”

While most amnesty applicants have one year to file, Beltran believed that he was part of a minority who have only 30 days to submit amnesty applications because of ongoing deportation proceedings against them. Under the new immigration law, certain amnesty seekers already involved in deportation cases must file their amnesty documents by June 3--30 days after the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s new legalization offices began accepting applications.

One INS employee told Beltran that his case, pending since January, 1986, came under the 30-day cutoff, but as it turned out, he and his family are not affected by it.

The confusion illustrates the uncertainty surrounding a relatively little-noticed requirement in the complicated law. And throughout the nation an untold number of illegal aliens who could qualify for amnesty are under pressure to file their applications by June 3.

Widespread Concern

“A lot of people are unaware that they are under any kind of a deadline,” said Linda Wong, who heads an immigrants’ civil rights program with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles.

Among immigrants’ rights groups, there is widespread concern that many applicants in the 30-day category will miss their opportunity to apply, either because they were unaware of the deadline or because they simply did not have sufficient time to gather evidence supporting their cases.

“We’re seeing a real backlog. I don’t think many of the 30-day people have even applied, and the time is almost half over,” said Lynn Alvarez, an attorney with El Rescate, which provides legal and social services to Central Americans in Los Angeles. “I think that only about 10% of the people who have to apply in the first 30 days will actually apply; the other 90% will miss it.”

Those who miss the deadline are not likely to have another chance to apply, since there is no appeal process for such cases.

The INS maintains that everyone was adequately notified of the 30-day requirement, either orally or in writing, and that the time alloted is enough to prepare an amnesty application. “No matter what time period we picked, someone would always say it was insufficient,” said John Belluardo, a spokesman for the INS in Los Angeles.

Number Affected Unknown

Just how many amnesty-seekers are affected by the 30-day deadline remains unknown--and a source of dispute. Ernest Gustafson, INS district director in Los Angeles, estimated that fewer than a dozen amnesty applicants in the Los Angeles area would come under the 30-day deadline, despite the area’s huge illegal population. Others called Gustafson’s estimate “incredibly low,” in the words of Charles Wheeler, director of the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights in Los Angeles.

Under INS regulations, amnesty applicants who must file within the 30-day period include certain foreigners who were arrested by immigration agents between last Nov. 6, the date the immigration statute was signed into law, and May 5, the start of the amnesty application period.

If these aliens were able to convince authorities that they had strong cases for amnesty, they were to be allowed to remain in the United States legally until June 3 in order to file their applications, according to the INS. The June 3 deadline also applied to illegal aliens who received official INS deportation summonses between Nov. 6 and May 5 and were able to defer deportation proceedings by demonstrating strong cases for amnesty.

Since the INS will not begin accepting amnesty applications under the agricultural worker section of the law until June 1, agricultural laborers under 30-day deadlines will have a different time requirement: They can submit amnesty applications until June 30.

Under the new immigration law, two sets of illegal aliens may qualify for legal status: those who have lived in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982; and farm workers who conducted at least 90 days of agricultural labor during the 90-day period that ended on May 1, 1986.

INS Guidelines

For some, the 30-day deadline will extend beyond the first month of the amnesty application period: INS guidelines also state that all aspiring amnesty applicants arrested or served with deportation orders after May 5 will have only 30 days to apply.

To further confuse the matter, before the INS issued final guidelines on the law, the Board of Immigration Appeals sent out letters--possibly hundreds of letters--informing some illegal aliens in ongoing deportation proceedings that they must submit amnesty applications by June 3.

Those letters are no longer valid, according to Gerald Hurwitz, counsel to the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department office that oversees the Board of Immigration Appeals. Nonetheless, lawyers for aliens who received the letters said they intend to file applications for amnesty before the 30-day deadline.