90% of Amnesty Applicants OKd by INS Officials

The vast majority of illegal immigrants who have gone through the first phase of the amnesty program in Southern California over the past three weeks have been recommended for legal status and given temporary work cards, federal immigration officials said.

More than 4,300 immigrants out of 5,000 (87%) interviewed by the middle of last week in the western states had been tentatively approved by Immigration and Naturalization Service examiners for legal status, the first step toward full citizenship.

Ernest Gustafson, INS Los Angeles district director, said he is confident that the high percentage of immigrants recommended for legal status will hold for the duration of the amnesty program. He said the figures also indicate that INS legalization examiners have been flexible with early applicants.

“The numbers show what we’ve said all along,” he said. “The cases have been clean, and our people are processing cases through as fast as they can. If this isn’t generosity, I don’t know what is.”

‘Routinely’ Handing Out Cards

At legalization centers throughout the Los Angeles and Orange County area, INS officials said, they are routinely handing out temporary work authorization cards to just about every immigrant who completes the first interview. At the Santa Ana legalization office last Friday, for example, INS examiners interviewed 50 amnesty applicants and gave temporary work cards to all 50.

In fact, the Santa Ana office has not issued a single denial to any of the 239 applicants who have reached the interview stage since the program began May 5, said George Newland, the office director. “I’ve said all along that these first ones are going to be the easy ones,” Newland said. “I think we’ll see the fraudulent ones coming in at a later date.”

Some application packets, however, are being returned along with the processing fee because they are incomplete or were filled out incorrectly, Newland said. Those applicants may resubmit their packets with the additional information, he said.

After the slow start of three weeks ago, INS officials say that many of their larger processing offices are now interviewing as many as 100 immigrants per day. The El Monte and Hollywood offices have become so busy that they are phasing out the walk-in interviews that were being carried out in the early days of the program and are now taking appointments for interviews.

Guadelupe Ochoa, director of the El Monte office, attributed his office’s increased demand to the lessening of anxiety about the amnesty program. He said that immigrants leaving the office with their work cards have been showing the cards to friends and relatives, who in turn show up to apply for their own cards.

“You see how thrilled they are when they walk out with their cards,” Ochoa said. “They realize that there’s no green and white (border patrol) bus waiting around the corner to stack them up and take them back across the border.”

Even immigration attorneys and representatives of church and independent immigration counseling agencies who have voiced skepticism about the INS’ handling of the amnesty acknowledged that the program appears to have run smoothly in its first weeks.

“The INS people have been efficient, courteous, prompt,” said immigration attorney Ira Bank. “If they had report cards, they’d get straight A’s.”

Some Snags

But some INS critics cautioned that there have been snags in the program’s early weeks and expressed fears that the process may become more arduous for immigrants as the amnesty continues.

One independent processing agency, One-Stop Immigration Center, reported that 300 early applications were delayed by uncertainty over changes in amnesty regulations. Juan Gutierrez, the group’s director, said the 300 applications were delayed for two weeks because of INS “flip-flops” on regulations governing the filing of medical and social security forms.

“We had people calling up very angrily, asking why their cases hadn’t been processed yet,” Gutierrez said. Still, he had praise for the program. “They’ve (INS) been as good as they can, considering the resources available and how little time they had to get ready.”

Other independent agencies said they were worried by signs that many applications were being returned by INS examiners because they lacked adequate documentation. The Rev. Luis Olivares, of Los Angeles’ Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, said that during a recent meeting of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, several directors of independent agencies complained that large numbers of early applications were being returned.

Applications Returned

One group, Olivares said, reported that only 3 of its first batch of 37 applications had been accepted for interviews. The rest were returned for more documentation.

“A lot of these decisions are being made by examiners who do not have a lot of experience or any experience at all,” Olivares said. “My big concern is that some of these applications are being sent back too quickly. We may end up with some people getting discouraged by having to keep looking for more documents. In some cases, it might even be better to get a recommended denial and then appeal it down the line.”

INS officials said that of the 9,200 applications that had been received by the middle of last week (almost 80% of those applications were in the Los Angeles area), 6,700 had been complete enough to accept fees and schedule interviews. Donna Coultice, associate Western regional director for legalization, said that the remaining 2,500 applications were returned to immigrants for additional documentation. Fewer than 100 cases had actually been recommended for denial, INS officials estimated.

Gustafson said that the large number of applications returned for more documentation was an example of the agency’s flexibility. He said that most applicants preferred getting a second chance at shoring up their cases to submitting weak cases that would probably be denied for lack of evidence.

“Why should we recommend for denial when they can go back and get more documents?” Gustafson said. “It would only clog up the system with denied cases that could have otherwise been approved.”