ACLU Assails Proposal : INS Would Take Asylum Ruling Role From Judges

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has issued proposed new regulations designed to ease the burden for illegal immigrants seeking political asylum by having INS specialists, rather than immigration judges, act on asylum applications.

The regulations, outlined Monday at a federal court hearing in Los Angeles, propose “a very, very dramatic change” in the way the government processes asylum requests, INS lawyers said.

“I think it will make it easier to get asylum,” said Allen Hausman, assistant director of the INS Office of Immigration Litigation’s civil division. “Asylum will no longer be an adversary proceeding.”

The proposed regulations have drawn fire from civil rights lawyers, however, who complain that they would eliminate asylum applicants’ access to an independent immigration judge and leave final determinations in the hands of an agency historically resistant to many asylum requests.

“It takes the judge out of the procedure altogether, the one impartial element in the whole process,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing thousands of Salvadoran immigrants in a class-action lawsuit challenging present INS asylum policies.

Government lawyers unveiled the proposed regulations at the conclusion of a nearly 5-year-old lawsuit before U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon. The lawsuit accuses U.S. immigration officials of systematically denying Salvadoran refugees their rights to apply for political asylum.

The proposed regulations, Hausman said, could have an important bearing on Judge Kenyon’s determination of whether INS officials are obeying a 1982 court order requiring them to tell Salvadorans that they have a right to apply for asylum.

Under current regulations, aliens who claim fear of persecution if they are deported to their homeland are entitled to a full evidentiary hearing before an immigration judge, one of a team of 65 judges who hear up to 15,000 cases annually from asylum applicants.

Under the proposed regulations, according to Hausman, asylum applications would be handled by a corps of specially trained asylum officers whose findings would be binding on immigration judges conducting deportation hearings.

The INS is seeking comment on the proposed regulations, published Friday, over the next 60 days. Should they become final, they would go into effect 30 days after that.