INS Facing Lawsuit Over Enforcement of ‘Restrictive’ Rule

A coalition of California public-interest groups announced Wednesday that they will file a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and claimed that the agency’s use of a restrictive rule will prevent as many as 500,000 illegal aliens from applying under the national amnesty program.

The lawsuit, scheduled to be filed today in U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleges that the immigration agency’s “rigid interpretation” of a provision in the immigration law prevents many undocumented Asian and European aliens from qualifying for legalization.

“The INS has turned (the ruling) into a brick wall,” said attorney Peter Schey, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and other immigrant advocate groups.

Halt Use of Rule

The lawsuit requests that the agency halt its use of the restrictive rule and extend the deadline on its one-year amnesty period, which ends May 4. The suit also asks for an injunction stopping INS deportations of any illegal aliens turned down for amnesty because of the strict rule. A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this month in Washington.

The dispute revolves around a section of the 1986 immigration law that allows illegal aliens who entered the United States before Jan. 1, 1982, with tourist, student or any other temporary non-immigrant visas to apply for amnesty as long as they were “known to the government.”

Immigrant rights groups interpret the phrase to mean that immigrants who entered with a legal visa before 1982 and then stayed on illegally should be able to apply for amnesty as long as their illegal status was known by any governmental agency.

The agency insists that “known to the government” refers only to the immigration agency. INS officials add that as long as immigrants were in the United States legally as of the 1982 deadline, they are not eligible for the amnesty--which is for aliens who were here illegally before 1982.

Under the immigrant activists’ reading of the law, many Asians and Europeans who entered the country as tourists and students and then stayed after the visas expired would be able to file for legalization by using evidence of communication with government agencies before 1982.

Asian Applicants

Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian-Pacific American Legal Center, estimates that an additional 25,000 Asians in the western United States might apply for amnesty if the lawsuit is upheld. By early March, Kwoh said, only 25,000 Asians had filed.

More than a million amnesty applications have already been filed, but the government has been criticized for delays and restrictive rulings that are expected to keep applications below 1.35 million by May.

In one case, Kwoh said, a Thai immigrant who arrived in 1979 on a student visa tried to use his pre-1982 tax records to prove that he was “known to the government.” Because the INS prohibits most students from working while they are still enrolled in school, “his Internal Revenue Service records showed that he was working illegally and was out of legal status,” Kwoh said.

But the Thai immigrant was turned down for amnesty because the INS had never received any notification from him before 1982 that he was in violation of his temporary student status.

“As far as the agency was concerned, these people had valid visas as of Jan. 1, 1982,” said Duke Austin, an INS spokesman in Washington. “If the agency was not notified of an immigrant’s illegal status, we have to assume they were here legally.”

Austin said that the agency will not accept an immigrant’s contacts with any federal agencies because “we are the only agency that can determine whether an alien is legal or illegal.”

Meanwhile, a local Latino organization plans to collect more than 200,000 signatures in the next month in hopes of influencing Congress to amend and extend the amnesty program. The Asociacion Latina De Asistencia (Hispanic Assistance Assn.) said it will ask Congress to expand the amnesty to immediate family members of qualified applicants and called for the May 4 deadline to be extended by a year.