U.S. Judge Orders Town to Let INS Center Reopen

A federal judge on Monday overrode local authorities and ordered the reopening of a refugee processing center that was padlocked last week as a health and fire hazard.

U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela set aside at least temporarily an order Friday by a state district judge that had barred the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from using the center in Harlingen.

“There’s between 200 and 300 people outside there right now waiting to be processed,” Omer G. Sewell, INS director in Harlingen, 25 miles north of this border city, said shortly after the court action.

He later said that immigration officials had regained access to the building and planned to begin seeing applicants again this morning.

More than 2,000 people a week, mostly from Central America, have been applying for political asylum at the INS Harlingen office. Many of the applicants have camped near the building while waiting for their paper work to be processed.

City officials, who had sued in state district court to be allowed to padlock the center, said that they would comply with Vela’s order once they had seen it.

Conditions ‘Remain the Same’

“As far as I am concerned, it is still closed. I have not been served” with Vela’s order, said Gavino Sotelo, Harlingen city manager. “The conditions at the center remain the same as they were before. There is trash; there is human waste. If this goes on, we might have to close it all over again.”

Sewell said that barring the INS from the building in Harlingen would have created another crisis for homeless Central Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.

The last crisis led Vela to issue an order on Jan. 9 to force the INS to allow the applicants to pursue their cases at their intended U.S. destinations, rather than holding them at the INS center in Harlingen, where they had first reported.

In overturning the order by state District Judge Robert Garza, Vela said that it “prohibits the functions and operations of an agency of the federal government.”

He said, however, that his order should not be interpreted to mean that the INS does not have to comply with state or local laws or ordinances related to public health and fire safety.