50 Illegal Immigrants Stage Protest at INS Office

About 50 illegal immigrants demonstrated Tuesday in front of an Immigration and Naturalization Service office in the Pico-Union district to protest the agency’s alleged out-of-hand dismissal of hundreds of late amnesty applications.

The rally, organized by the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles, protested the agency’s insistence on what organizers said is an extraordinary amount of documentation to support late applications. The demonstrators also called for the dismissal of INS official Debra Perez, head of the Pico-Union office.

“We have to force the INS to deal with these aliens fairly,” said attorney and protest organizer Cesar Noriega-Pena. “They aren’t right now.”

In 1988, a federal judge ordered the INS to accept applications beyond the original sign-up deadline from immigrants who had been told they were ineligible because they either improperly used visas to return to the United States during the initial sign-up period or left this country without INS permission. Mary Ellen Elwood, INS associate director for legalization in the western states, said the Pico-Union office has been properly reviewing late applications.

She said the rejection rate of the late applications has hovered near 90% because of the extensive use of fraudulent documents.

The late-application program, believed to affect about 40,000 aliens in Los Angeles, has been a source of irritation between the INS and immigrant-rights advocates. Archbishop Roger M. Mahony recently accused the INS of “bad faith” for rejecting many of the late applications.

“As for Debra Perez, she’s been in charge of the training sessions there (for late amnesty) and we’ve been in full compliance with the court order,” Elwood said.