INS to Release 200 Seeking Asylum : Refugees: A pilot program will free them pending resolution of their requests for political status in a major policy shift for the agency. But advocates lament the plan’s limited scope.

Reversing a nearly decade-old practice, federal authorities Thursday announced a pilot program that will parole from detention facilities certain groups of foreign-born immigrants who are seeking political asylum.

The 18-month program, to begin next Tuesday in Los Angeles and three other cities, represents a departure from the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s long-standing policy of detaining many asylum applicants, and may signal a thaw in the agency’s traditional skepticism toward seekers of political-refugee status.

Nationwide, 200 asylum applicants will be freed as the project gets under way. They will be required to report monthly to INS officials, either by mail or in person. They also must post a bond ranging from $500 to $2,500 and show they have a place to live and work.

“This project will enable us to reduce detention time for certain aliens whose asylum claims appear to be genuine,” INS Commissioner Gene McNary said in a statement released in Washington.

In addition to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Miami will participate in the program. McNary said these cities were chosen because they have “gateway” airports.

The test group will be made up primarily of Chinese, Haitians, Sri Lankans and Afghans.

Advocates for refugees hope that if the experiment works, it could lead to a broader review of INS treatment of political asylum applicants.

“This project may, indeed, signal the beginning of the end of one of the harshest elements of the INS’ detention policy,” said Arthur C. Helton, director of the refugee project of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

The committee estimates that 7,500 immigrants are being held in INS detention centers across the nation awaiting deportation or the processing of their asylum requests. The INS estimates it has about 200,000 pending asylum applications at any one time.

Helton began discussing ideas for the pilot program with McNary last year. He credited a “new sensitivity” toward asylum issues on the part of McNary, who became head of the sprawling immigration agency last October, as one of the reasons for the agency’s decision to go ahead with the experiment.

Money might also be another consideration. The INS presumably could save millions of dollars if it found an acceptable alternative to holding asylum applicants in detention facilities.

The pilot program is limited in its scope.

It will apply only to the so-called “excludable aliens”--foreign-born people who are stopped at a point of entry into the United States and do not have a valid passport or visa. In the eyes of the law, they have never technically entered the country. Excludable aliens, in most cases, are automatically detained and have no right to post bond to secure their release.

The classification differs from “deportable aliens,” who are apprehended after entering the United States. Deportable aliens, even though in some cases they have only traveled a few yards into the country, have a right to post bond and often can gain temporary freedom.

But many excludable aliens languish in detention facilities for months and even years while their applications for political asylum wend through the system, according to attorneys who work with refugees.

“We are talking about people who are largely refugees and have been singled out for especially adverse treatment in terms of automatic and continued detention under onerous circumstances,” Helton said. Detention centers are ill-equipped for long-term imprisonment, he said.

In 1981, the INS, overwhelmed by the influx of tens of thousands of Cubans and smaller numbers of Haitians who arrived on Florida’s shores in boats, began a policy of incarcerating applicants for political asylum. The INS defended the practice, saying asylum-seekers who were let go invariably never again reported to authorities.

The policy has been challenged in court several times but stood in force, until now.

“This program is welcome,” said Gerard Jean-Juste, executive director of the Haitian Refugee Center of Miami, a city where more than 400 Haitians are being held. “If it is fair to refugees, that will bring a sip of justice to southern Florida.”

In the chorus of praise welcoming the program, there were also voices of caution. Some advocates said the program was too limited to help large numbers of asylum applicants while others feared the bond was too high and the criteria too stiff.

A bond of “$2,500 will doom the program,” said Niels Frenzen, who heads the immigration project for Public Counsel, an organization of public-interest attorneys in Los Angeles that is participating in the program.

“The true asylum-seeker is the person in most danger (in his native country),” he said. “They are the ones who have hopped on a plane without a lot of planning, and they don’t really have that (amount of money) . . . in their pockets.”

Other requirements immigration lawyers say may be difficult to meet: Applicants must be able to supply the name and address of an employer or sponsor; they must have an attorney or accredited legal representation, and they must demonstrate that their asylum case is a good one.

For now, the program will have a narrow application in Los Angeles. Fewer than 100 of the hundreds of illegal immigrants detained in local INS facilities belong to the eligible category; some have already been paroled because of overcrowding. The vast majority of undocumented aliens in Los Angeles are Mexican and Central Americans who arrive over land and are able to cross well into U.S. territory before being detected.

Nevertheless, for those asylum applicants who are eligible, the benefit is significant.

“It is very difficult to prepare an asylum application for someone in detention,” said Linton Joaquin, an attorney for the Central American Refugee Center who once had a client sit in INS custody for a year waiting for an asylum application to be processed.

“It takes considerable time to meet with someone (and) find out their story,” Joaquin said. “It is not easy to do if they are in detention.”