Tougher INS Policy Held Effective : Senate Study Finds Drop in ‘Frivolous’ Asylum Requests

The federal government’s tough policy of detaining Central American immigrants at the Texas border is working, according to a new congressional report that calls the approach “effective in deterring frivolous asylum applications.”

At the same time, however, the 32-page study by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee warns that intelligence sources within the Immigration and Naturalization Service have discovered “a large number of Central Americans” waiting in Mexico, just south of Brownsville, Tex., “to observe the next move of the INS before deciding how and where to enter the United States.”

That caveat in a generally positive assessment of INS’ 3-week-old detention policy is a metaphor for the way a broad range of immigration experts view the policy’s long-range effect.

2,000 Taken Into Custody

Even staunch critics of the INS concede that the policy of detaining undocumented immigrants who fail to qualify for political asylum has stemmed the flow of Central Americans who turn themselves in to U.S. officials at the border. So far, about 2,000 have been taken into custody. But no one is willing to say the policy will permanently eliminate the problem of dealing with the tens of thousands of people fleeing their war-torn homelands in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras.

Instead, experts warn, the policy is fraught with pitfalls, including inadequate detainment space for massive numbers of would-be refugees; the expense of housing them; negative perceptions by foreigners, and a long, bitter entanglement of lawsuits filed by immigrant rights advocates who maintain that the policy denies asylum-seekers access to legal counsel.

While acknowledging that the INS detention policy deters “frivolous” applicants, the subcommittee report calls for increased efforts to attract “true refugees” and urges that potential beneficiaries of asylum be provided counseling by refugee groups before applying. “Simply put, more cases should be approved,” the report says.

Under current policy, as David North, director of the Center for Labor and Migration Studies put it, “We take on refugees who are fleeing from Communist countries that we are mad at.” Thus, Nicaraguans are more likely than Salvadorans to gain refugee status when they claim a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country.

The dispute over who should be admitted as a refugee or whether U.S. officials should jail those who fail to gain that status is a recurring American debate, surfacing most recently in the early 1980s when Haitians were detained much as Central Americans are today. Then, as now, immigrant advocates complained that the law was being applied unfairly.

Revising U.S. refugee laws has been made more difficult because the INS, in initiating its detention policy on Feb. 20, “chose actions that have been sensational and crisis-oriented,” declared Doris Meissner, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee.

INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson, testifying before the same panel, portrayed the new policy as successful, asserting that detention at the point of entry in Texas is necessary to prevent Central Americans from disappearing “into the woodwork” in cities such as Los Angeles, Washington and Miami.

Moreover, said the commissioner, if the INS runs out of detention space, it will, as it did with Cubans in the early 1980s, hold Central Americans on military bases. One Justice Department official termed that idea “only in the thinking stage. The military hates it” because of the negative public perception.

Rick Swartz, president of the National Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Forum, said that by detaining people who might later qualify for refugee status, the United States “loses its standing to criticize” other countries on human rights violations.

Numbers Rise Steadily

According to the INS, the number of detained immigrants has risen steadily during the last several years, reaching 92,799 in fiscal 1988. Kept for varying lengths of time, they are held in seven detention centers, including one at El Centro, Calif. The other centers are located in Texas, Arizona, New York, Florida, Louisiana and Massachusetts.

Estimates of the cost of detaining the immigrants range from $15 to $150 per day per person, and the INS’ detainment budget for this year is about $150 million. The immigrants are given a choice of returning to their home countries or remaining in detention while their claims of asylum are adjudicated, a process that can take years.

A scathing audit of the INS by the Justice Department, its parent agency, shows that the waits are getting longer. The average detention time increased from 10.5 days in fiscal 1986 to 14.3 days last year, the internal audit said, noting “some problems which could result in illegal aliens . . . being detained longer than necessary.”

Heated Exchange

An exchange last week between Nelson and Rep. Bruce A. Morrison (D-Conn.), the subcommittee chairman, illustrated the volatility of the detainment issue. Morrison, who recently visited the Texas border area, asserted that because hundreds of immigrants still make their way across the border each week, the situation “looks to me like an impending disaster.”

“Well, we all hope it’s not,” Nelson replied, adding that while “we never have enough” detention space, the key to making the policy work depends on whether “the word (on detention) gets back down the line, whether we stick to our guns.”

The current policy’s success also depends on how many people decide to leave Central America and other regions and enter this country without documents.

The Senate subcommittee report, prepared by staff members who were dispatched to Texas by Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), the ranking minority member, found that “large numbers of Central Americans were now simply ‘giving up’ on their homelands” because “they saw no hope for improvement in their economies, for the settlement of their civil wars or for the development of greater opportunity.”

Confirming the report’s finding of Central Americans waiting at the border, Juan Garcia, assistant chief of the McAllen, Tex., sector of the INS Border Patrol, said they number at least 2,000. He said agents checked hotels in Mexico, just across from Brownsville, Tex., looking for non-Mexicans.

“What we find,” he said, “is, for the most part, once they get up to the McAllen area, they’re more or less committed. Their funds are exhausted, and they cannot return to their country.”