Critics and INS in Dispute as Amnesty Deadline Nears

With only four weeks to go in the nation’s amnesty program, the war of words between immigrants’ rights groups and U.S. immigration authorities in San Diego escalated Monday, as each side accused the other of distorting the program’s record.

On the campus of the University of San Diego, a coalition of community organizations, joined by U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., reiterated earlier criticism of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and urged passage of a proposed extension of the amnesty program to allow more undocumented immigrants to apply.

“We feel that the INS has completely failed in educating affected people” about the amnesty program, said Marco Antonio Rodriguez, executive director of Centro de Asuntos Migratorios, a nonprofit group that assists amnesty applicants.

Not true, said INS officials, who held a press conference on a downtown street corner adjacent to the campus of San Diego City College.

“Amnesty is working,” said Harold Ezell, the western regional commissioner for the INS, which hosted similar press briefings Monday throughout the West in anticipation of the application deadline.

The differences illustrate a split nationwide between immigrant advocates seeking an extension of the one-year application period--which ends May 4--and INS officials opposed to such an extension.

Charging that thousands of eligible immigrants have yet to apply for amnesty, INS detractors have focused on two broad areas of criticism: The INS public information campaign on amnesty, which they characterize as inadequate, and the continued fear of many immigrants that the amnesty process will split their families.

Claim Law Harms Families

To dramatize the latter point, Roberto Gonzales of the Chicano Federation in San Diego recounted the story Monday of one family--a not atypical case, he said--in which the two-year-old child is a U.S. citizen by virtue of birth, the husband is eligible for amnesty but his wife is not. “This family lives under the threat of being torn apart,” said Gonzales.

But INS officials, vowing that no families will be separated by amnesty, publicly granted “extended voluntary departure”--a form of temporary U.S. residence--to a 5-year-old Nicaraguan girl, a resident of Brawley, who is ineligible for amnesty but whose farm-worker parents did qualify. The girl, Gretel Acuna, will be allowed to stay as long as her parents remain legal, said INS officials, who presented the family to the press.

In San Diego and Imperial counties, officials say that more than 56,500 people have applied for legal status under the amnesty program. That figure exceeds initial projections of 52,500 applicants, officials here say.

However, critics say hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who would qualify might never apply for a variety of reasons, including their lack of knowledge about the law and their longtime fear of the INS.