INS Accuses School District of Losing Amnesty Certificates : Agency Fears Forms Could Be Falsified to Show Completion of Citizenship Classes

The Immigration and Naturalization Service says the Los Angeles school district cannot account for 56,000 blank forms that could be forged and used as proof an immigrant has completed classes required to become a U. S. citizen.

The certificates could be falsified to show completion of the required 40 classroom hours of English, U. S. history and government classes, INS officials said. Residents seeking citizenship under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act must either complete the amnesty education classes or pass a test on U. S. history and government.

“There is a worry that the certificates might be sold illegally,” said Paul Gilbert, INS special assistant. “If they are used to defraud the INS, it’s a felony.”

Gilbert said there is no evidence so far that the federal forms have been used illegally.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Unified School District this week, the INS refused a request to supply more of the forms, called “certificates of satisfactory pursuit,” until the district can explain what happened to the missing ones and submit a plan to prevent future losses, Gilbert said.

‘Not Been Lost’

“The forms have not been lost,” said Domingo Rodriguez, head of the district’s amnesty preparation office. “We believe that a certain percentage is waste, another percentage is because of a temporary dislocation at school sites, and some have been typed out and are in student folders awaiting completion of the classes.”

But INS officials said that under agency guidelines, allowances are made for the loss of 10% of the certificates because of errors made filling them out. Using that estimate, INS officials said the Los Angeles district would have thrown out about 14,000 forms because of errors.

Officials of the district’s amnesty education program, which is the nation’s largest provider of such classes, said they will run out of certificates in the next few weeks, making it impossible to certify about 100,000 adult students who are expected to take amnesty education classes during the 1989-90 school year.

The district has issued about 140,000 certificates to students attending classes at more than 200 locations since the program began more than a year ago. But by mid-August, district officials reported that only about 40,000 of the original 250,000 INS forms remained.

“We’ve been out of them for about two months,” said Wade Manix, amnesty coordinator at John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles, which has scheduled 63 amnesty classes for the fall. “We issue about 100 certificates a week, and we’ve had to borrow them from other schools that now are running out themselves.”

Supply Dwindling

At North Hollywood Community Adult School, which has issued about 7,000 certificates since the program began, amnesty coordinator Danette Roe said her supply will run out in a few weeks.

“We’re going to have more than 2,000 students completing the classes this fall, so we’re going to need them soon,” Roe said.

But INS officials said that before any more forms are issued, the district will have to create new procedures for storing them and keep a list of employees who have access to them.

The dispute over the forms is the latest in a continuing exchange of criticism between the two agencies over the educational requirements of the immigration reform law.

Gilbert said if the INS finds that the district was negligent in keeping track of the certificates, the government could make the district ineligible to conduct any more amnesty education classes. “We are asking them to be more responsible with the forms,” he said.

Rodriguez, who earlier this year called INS efforts to encourage more eligible residents to apply for citizenship a “dismal failure,” blamed the INS for the problem.

Rodriguez said the INS should have told the district that it would be required to keep track of the certificates, which were delivered in December. He said the federal agency ignored district suggestions that the certificates be numbered to make accounting easier.

INS officials said the district could have numbered the 147 boxes of certificates when they were delivered. “It would have taken them 40 minutes to do it,” Gilbert said.