Congressman Asks Probe of Ezell’s View on Death Squads

A congressman, angered by allegations by INS Commissioner Harold Ezell that recent death squad-style threats in Los Angeles may have been an “orchestrated PR campaign” by the sanctuary movement to bolster one of his bills, demanded Wednesday a formal INS inquiry into the propriety of Ezell’s comments.

Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) also threatened to call a congressional investigation to determine whether Ezell had any information showing that religious sanctuary groups had filed fraudulent crime reports, which is a violation of state and federal law.

“I will defer any congressional investigation of Mr. Ezell’s conduct for a reasonable period awaiting your response,” he said in a letter to Alan C. Nelson, director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Ezell’s supervisor. Nelson was on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

Moakley heads the subcommittee on rules of the House and therefore has authority to call such an investigation on his own, according to the committee’s counsel.

Upon hearing news of Moakley’s action, Ezell said Wednesday:

“I don’t see any problem in the congressman asking for an investigation and I am happy to cooperate. . . . I think the record will stand on its own.”

The dispute arises from comments Ezell made to The Times last week in which he said he gave “no credence” to recent death squad threats, and considered them part of an “orchestrated PR (public relations) campaign” by the “dead sanctuary movement.”

Asked in the interview if he thought the threats were fabricated, Ezell answered: “I’m saying the timing is strange. I’m saying it’s an orchestrated PR campaign tied into (a) debate today.” Asked again if he thought the threats were fabricated, he said, “I don’t know.”

Specifically, he alleged that the threats were tied to a Moakley bill that would halt deportation of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans for two to three years while Congress studies human rights abuses in their homelands. The bill, opposed by the Reagan Administration, passed the House by a 237-to-181 vote the day the interview was published. It faces a tougher battle in the Senate.

A spokesman for the sanctuary movement dismissed Ezell’s comments as “outrageously insensitive . . . and totally inaccurate.”

Ezell said Wednesday that he will await the outcome of ongoing investigations to find out “if there is such a thing as a death squad” in Los Angeles, or if threats have been fabricated.

“I hope we made it clear that the unfortunate incidents are separate from people taking an opportunity . . . to say whatever they want,” he added, stressing that he did not mean to disparage the “tragic violation of . . . human rights” of one Salvadoran woman, who was kidnaped and molested by men she said interrogated her about her political views.

Although Ezell did not accuse Moakley of any involvement in a “PR campaign,” Moakley said he took Ezell’s comments personally.

“I’ve been in public service for 35 years and nobody’s ever impugned my motives on any issue,” he said.

“I took this bill on four years ago. I died with this thing for four years and everything I’d done, sweat and hard work, and everything priests and nuns had done, and then some faceless bureaucrat makes that statement that it was all staged for congressional debate. You’re goddamned right I was mad.”

According to Moakley’s letter to Nelson, Ezell’s remarks suggest that he has information that someone has violated state and federal laws by filing false crime reports about the death squad-style incidents. Those incidents are currently under investigation by the FBI which, like the INS, is part of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Either Mr. Ezell is in the position, as an employee of the Department of Justice, of having received information of a crime and taking the information public, to the jeopardy of an investigation by the department which employs him,” the letter charges, “or, without any evidence, he has presented as fact the wildest of speculation, with the obvious intent of improperly influencing the vote of the House on matters pending before it.”

If he lacks evidence to back up his claims, the letter says, “it seems likely that the issue of improperly attempting to influence matters before Congress returns to his doorstep.”