Laguna Niguel : New INS Asylum Program to Open

A new program designed to improve handling of applications for asylum by the Immigration and Naturalization Service will be put into place Tuesday at the temporary INS headquarters in Laguna Niguel, officials announced Thursday.

The office, which will serve Southern California, Arizona and southern Nevada, will be located in the Chet Holifield Federal Building for about 90 days, until permanent office space is found, said Rosemary Melville, director of the Los Angeles-area office.

That office is part of a restructuring of the asylum program to provide “more quality adjudication of each case that is presented to us,” Melville explained.

Other offices will be located in San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Arlington, Va., and Newark, N.J.

A national-resource center for the program has also been established in Washington.

Under the previous system, Melville said, officers were assigned to a variety of INS tasks. But now, “people will be dedicated only to asylum and they will be specialists in asylum (cases).”

Instead of continuing to report to INS district directors throughout the nation, specially trained teams of asylum officers will report directly to the Office of Refugees, Asylum and Parole at INS headquarters in Washington.

The reorganization was ordered last year by U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, formalizing a program that had been operating under interim rules since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Melville said the Los Angeles staff, including 28 asylum officers and four supervisors, recently completed extensive training in international laws and related asylum issues.

Currently, the Los Angeles-area office receives 50 to 100 new cases each day. Melville said officers will set up appointments at locations in San Diego, Las Vegas and Phoenix for applicants living in the farthest parts of the newly created region.

The permanent location of the Southern California office will be within a 10-mile radius of Buena Park, Melville said.

Earlier negotiations for office space in that city fell through, forcing the last-minute, temporary move to already-existing federal facilities in Laguna Niguel, she added.