Late-Filing Aliens Face Short Staffs, Confusion : Amnesty: When lawsuits cleared the way for an additional 250,000 to seek permanent residency, INS officials in Washington sent out a memo ordering local offices to make the “late filings” a low priority.

Hoping for a last chance to qualify under the federal amnesty program, hundreds of undocumented aliens have been crowding local offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, some camping out overnight only to be turned away because of a shortage of staff to process all the cases.

Although the amnesty program officially ended in May, 1988, the new rush came after two lawsuits cleared the way for an estimated 250,000 additional people to quality for permanent residency.

The lawsuits, filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens and Catholic Social Services, contended that the INS was unfairly excluding people who had left the country briefly since 1982. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Naturalization Act granted amnesty to aliens who could prove they had been living in this country continuously since 1982.

The lawsuits asked that amnesty be extended to people who had left the country for “brief, casual or innocent” periods since 1982 but had maintained permanent residency in the United States.

The INS, which is fighting the suits, has been ordered to begin processing applications of “late filers” under the new program, INS officials said. The problem, according to the INS, was that the staffing level at INS offices had been greatly reduced since the amnesty program ended in 1988, and the new flood of applicants has overburdened local staffs.

Two weeks ago, INS officials in Washington sent out a memo ordering local offices to make the “late filings” a low priority.

The result has been a skeleton staff of INS officials to take the thousands of amnesty applications being received. Many INS offices in Southern California are taking between five and 25 applications a day, said Dona Coultice, associate director of Legalization for the Western Regional INS office in Laguna Niguel.

The new limits on the number of people who can apply for amnesty have led to frustration, long lines and, in at least one case, violence.

At the legalization office on Ritchey Street in Santa Ana, police were called on Monday of last week when a fistfight broke out among several people over who was first in line before the office opened at 8 a.m. That same week, the crush of those waiting broke down one of the front doors, a private security officer and immigrant rights advocates said.

The scenes have been repeated to some extent at the 10 legalization offices in the Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange County areas, INS officials say. Similar crowds have been reported in recent weeks at legalization offices in Chicago, New York, Miami, Tucson and Phoenix, according to immigrant advocacy groups.

“I’m hearing about fistfights all over the country,” said Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles.

A 32-year-old Santa Ana woman, who did not want her name used, said she waited three nights outside the Santa Ana office recently before officials there accepted her application.

The first time, she arrived at 9 p.m. the night before but did not make it to the front of the line when the office opened the next morning. The next night, she slept in her car, only to be told the next morning that only those who had actually been in line, and not in their cars, would be accepted.

On Monday before last, when some people arrived at dawn, claiming that they had been first in line, a fight broke out and the police were called, she said. Finally, INS officials took applications from about 20 people in line.

“I don’t think it’s fair that they do it that way,” said the woman, who had waited for three nights and who works as a waitress at a Fashion Island restaurant.

Nilesh Patel, a Los Angeles insurance salesman, camped out for two days with a friend from India outside the Wilshire Boulevard INS office last week, waiting for it to open. They arrived at 6 p.m. the day before to assure that they would be waited on, along with 30 or 40 other people.

“They only took the first 10 people in line, and we never got in,” Patel said. “My friend is just going to keep trying. It’s first come, first serve. I think 10 is too small of a number.”

Coultice, the INS spokeswoman, said the crush is worse in some areas than in others.

“Frankly, the offices closer to downtown Los Angeles, and the one in San Fernando, are the hardest hit,” she said. “Huntington Park and Hollywood are also feeling it, probably because of the large concentration of undocumenteds.

“It’s unfortunate, but we’re not any happier with this than anyone else,” she said. “But what happened is that we were just building an ongoing backlog (of other cases). It was getting larger and larger and larger. And with our limited resources . . . we had to resort to a first-come, first-serve basis.”

The Santa Ana office, for example, had 435 cases relating to other amnesty business that were scheduled to be processed on Monday. INS officials explained that they could see only about 10 people who were late filers.

INS spokesman Duke Austin in Washington said the small staffs at legalization offices can’t keep up with the workload being presented by the late filers. About 3 million amnesty applications have been processed nationwide.

“If not for the extension program, the offices would be all but closed up right now,” Austin said. “We didn’t plan for a lawsuit which would benefit a huge number of people.”

Stephen A. Rosenbaum, staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance in San Francisco which helped Catholic Social Services with its lawsuit, said that California, which has about half of the amnesty applicants nationwide, has been most the heavily affected by the late-filing program. However, he said that legalization offices in Tuscon and Phoenix are experiencing similar problems.

Others say the memo put out by the INS office in Washington to treat the late filers as a low priority has caused confusion nationwide.

Some legalization offices, for example, interpreted the memorandum to mean that they could subject immigrants to full-bore amnesty interviews, some attorneys suggest. Others began requiring more documentation, different application forms and even different times in which to file.

“The problem that is happening is that there has been inconsistent and incorrect procedures adopted by the INS offices,” said Susan Alva, an attorney with Public Counsel, a nonprofit legal-services group in Los Angeles. “It’s almost like on Tuesday you have to stand on your right foot to apply and on Thursday you have to stand on your left foot to apply.”

LIVING UNDER NEW RULES

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted residency status to immigrants who could prove they had lived in this country continuously since Jan. 1, 1982, and also legalized residency for certain agricultural workers.

Nationwide, more than 3 million people qualified for amnesty, while in Orange County there were 186,000--enough to rank the county third in the nation in the number of newly legalized residents.

Two lawsuits filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens and Catholic Social Services have forced the INS to also legalize an estimated 250,000 persons nationally, who while they could prove they had lived here since 1982, had left the country for “brief, casual or innocent” visits to their homelands. The number of people affected in Orange County is not known.