Aliens Rush to Apply for Amnesty as Deadline Nears

More than 1,000 people showed up at the federal immigration amnesty office in El Monte two weeks ago, jamming into the cramped waiting area, lining up on the stairs and drifting into every square foot of open floor space. When the building manager shut down the elevator to keep late-comers from crowding in, some of them pelted the building with bottles.

“The nicest name they were shouting was ‘liars,’ ” said Alma Vielma, a Catholic Charities supervisor who was there.

It was an example of the communication gaps that still trouble the 9-month-old federal amnesty program, which some illegal immigrants continue to look upon with considerable suspicion, even though more than 1 million of them have used it to apply for “legalization.”

In this case, computers at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Regional Processing Facility in Laguna Niguel had suddenly spit out thousands of notices for applicants to come to the El Monte office for their temporary residency cards, without specifying a time to do so.

Showed Up Saturday

“What happened was that people who worked from Monday to Friday, not wanting to take time off from work, decided that the best time to pick up their cards was on Saturday,” said Ernest Gustafson, director of the immigration service’s Los Angeles District. “It wasn’t just one person but hundreds.”

But the incident, during which 679 of the cards were actually distributed by a staff of six beleaguered clerks as police dispersed the crowd outside, also showed the considerable work that remains to be done as the one-year program heads into its final 90 days. May 4 is the deadline for those who qualify to submit their applications.

Federal officials in the Los Angeles District, where more than 480,000 people have already applied for amnesty, are expecting between 250,000 and 300,000 more before the program shuts down.

“I’d say there’s absolutely a zero chance of an extension of the deadline,” said Gustafson. “Why put your hopes on something for which there’s no climate in Washington?”

Many in the San Gabriel Valley are getting that message. After a marked drop-off in applications at the two offices in the region, new applicants are streaming in again, officials at the El Monte and Pomona offices report. These offices, along with legalization offices in Hollywood, Huntington Park and East Los Angeles, are the five busiest in the nation.

“The door is closing,” said Mavis Salgado, chief legalization officer for the El Monte office, which has processed more than 38,000 applications for amnesty since the program began last May. The Pomona office has processed more than 34,000.

On peak days in El Monte last August, the office was processing more than 700 applications a day. But then business tapered off from October through the Christmas holidays. “Around Christmas we were getting a lot of ‘no-shows,’ people who had scheduled appointments but didn’t come in,” Salgado said.

But now the trend is strongly upward again as the people Salgado calls “minute men”--those who procrastinate until the last moment--are starting to come forward.

The office’s waiting area is crowded again, with applicants cradling infants in their arms and toddlers wending aimlessly through the aisles. “There’s no problem in waiting,” said Nicolas Lopez, sitting there last Friday with his wife, four sons and a daughter for an appointment that was an hour and a half overdue. “It’s the children who get impatient.”

The same thing is happening in the Pomona office, where new applications have doubled in the past two weeks, as well as in the programs of the voluntary organizations that are helping to process applications. “All of a sudden there’s a big boom,” said Vielma of Catholic Charities, which has consolidated its six San Gabriel Valley offices into a single one in East Los Angeles. “It’s like taxes. Most people don’t file until April 14th or 15th.”

But interviews with applicants showed that while there is a natural tendency to procrastinate, many people are being drawn by a pair of favorable regulatory changes that liberalized some standards for qualification.

Until last September, for example, the Mexican-born Lopez and his family would not have qualified for amnesty because of a series of short journeys they made to their home city of Leon, Mexico, returning to California with visitors’ visas. The visas, obtained on the fraudulent claim that the Lopezes intended to visit the United States only for a short visit, had the effect of placing the family briefly on a legal footing.

Ironically, “legality” would have disqualified them, as the law was originally interpreted. The requirement was that applicants must have been continuously “illegal” since Jan. 1, 1982.

Wife Told of Trip

“This came up in the district the first day of the amnesty program,” said Gustafson. “In fact, the very first case that came into the district involved a young couple who had been here since 1978. The husband flew through the interview, but the wife admitted very honestly that she had gone out of the country for eight days in 1982 and come back with a visitor’s visa. According to the law, she was not eligible. She had come in with a legal document after January 1982.”

Gustafson, realizing that “there must be thousands who fit that category” because of the ease of travel between California and Mexico, recommended that the INS permit such applicants to apply for a waiver of the requirement of continuous “illegality.” In September, INS headquarters in Washington agreed.

“Without the change, I couldn’t even have submitted the application,” said Lopez, a janitor in a Los Angeles factory, who had used the visa instead of crossing the border with his family through the dangerous no-man’s-land near Tijuana.

At the same time, the INS loosened its requirement that applicants could never have been recipients of direct public assistance--that is, welfare but not Medi-Cal or unemployment insurance--during their illegal residency in the United States. “As long as you’ve terminated the direct assistance and you can show you’re able to support yourself or that somebody is supporting you, the requirement can be waived,” Gustafson explained.

Such was the case with a woman with two small children waiting to speak to Vielma at the Catholic Charities amnesty center in East Los Angeles last week. “I wasn’t going to apply, because people said I couldn’t,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “Then a lady I know said, ‘Try it. Maybe they’ll approve you.’ ”

Her dilemma was that she continues to receive public assistance for her three American-born daughters. “I’m willing to go to work,” she said, “but all I would earn would be about $120 a week. It costs me $100 for a baby sitter.”

The INS has still not ruled on whether cases such as hers are subject to waivers, said Vielma. But the Vielma was able to dispel the woman’s fears about a rumor she had heard in her El Monte neighborhood.

Applicant Reassured

“People told me that if I applied for amnesty, la migra (the INS) would deport me and keep my children here in foster homes,” the woman said. Vielma assured her that it was not true.

Both the El Monte and the Pomona offices are actively trying to reach prospective new applicants. For example, Salgado has designated one staff member to do nothing but outreach, attending meetings and reminding neighborhood organizations of the impending deadline. “You reach out and touch,” Salgado said.

Starting next week, both offices expect to remain open every weekday until 7 p.m. instead of closing at 5 p.m. “Towards the end of April, we’ll probably be staying open until midnight,” Salgado added.

On March 3, Spanish radio station KTNQ will conduct a three-hour live broadcast from the Pomona INS office, publicizing the amnesty program. “We want to make sure that people know the door is closing,” said Gilbert. “We wouldn’t want anybody left out simply because they weren’t aware of that.”

The two regulatory changes, as well as the approach of the deadline, are already bringing dozens of new applicants in, several voluntary agencies reported. “In all of December, we opened just nine cases,” said Lenore Ramirez, head of an AFL-CIO immigrant assistance program in El Monte. “But during the first couple of weeks in January, we opened 40.”

Unfortunately, the new applicants are often arriving with particularly knotty problems of documentation. “In the beginning, we got the cream of the crop--people with no qualms about applying because there were no documentation problems,” said Vielma.

Now, the applicants are more typically ones who have difficulties proving their whereabouts during the past six years. “There’s more of a tendency to want to use affidavits from friends and relatives to cover the necessary time frame,” said Robert Gilbert, chief legalization officer at the Pomona INS office. “There are a lot who are not making a real effort to get the necessary documentation.”

But the difficulties are often not of the applicants’ doing, insisted Carlos Blanco, a Salvadoran factory worker from Los Angeles whose application was being processed in Pomona. “You look for the bosses you used to work for, and they’re not in the same place,” he said. “At some places where I lived, I never paid rent in my own name. You go to the building to get an affidavit that you used to live there, and you find that they’ve changed managers.”

Blanco, who came to Los Angeles in 1979, hidden under a wooden box in the back of a truck, is determined to stay. The prospect of deportation gives him a distant, worried look.

“In my country the army kills people, the guerrillas kill people,” he said. “In this country, you work hard, but there’s a good future.”