Jet-Age Immigrants Are Swamping INS Facilities : Detention: The number of ‘excludable aliens,’ many of whom arrive by plane, has soared in recent years.

Spawned by the growth of international smuggling rings and convenient air travel, a new generation of illegal immigrants has begun flooding into the United States via a Jet-Age strategy that abandons the traditional land route over the U.S.-Mexico border in favor of a coach seat on a 747.

Over the past year, thousands of illegal immigrants--part of a burgeoning worldwide movement of immigrants fleeing war, disaster or poverty--have opted to escape their native lands using direct flights to the United States.

The vast majority of these new migrants have come from Asian countries, such as India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China, and they often pay tens of thousands of dollars to so-called “travel agents” for false documents and air passage.

They have become one of the fastest-growing segments of illegal immigration, although their numbers still are few in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who cross the southern border each year.

The number of aliens attempting to enter the country through airports has skyrocketed from 3,300 in 1987 to more than 10,000 in the first eight months of fiscal year 1990-91.

Nowhere has the impact been felt harder than in Los Angeles. Two years ago, only 313 aliens were apprehended at the airport. By comparison, 6,992 aliens have been detained in the last eight months.

The unprecedented influx has easily overwhelmed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s detention capacity. Faced with a chronic shortage of detention space, INS officials decided to release hundreds of aliens into the streets at one point.

“There’s no question there’s been an explosion,” said Robert M. Moschorak, director of the INS’ Los Angeles District. “People know when detention space here is overloaded and word goes back very quickly.”

But for these illegal immigrants, the journey to the United States has not been just an easy hop over the ocean.

They are caught in a murky area of immigration policy, which at once encourages their coming to the United States through a liberal asylum policy, but also inflicts long detention on them to deter others from attempting the journey.

“It’s a bizarre doctrine,” said Arthur C. Helton, director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. “On the one hand, we want to show the world that the U.S. is receptive to accepting refugees. But on the other hand, we put them in these very nasty little jails.”

In Los Angeles, some illegal immigrants say they have been subjected to harsh treatment in INS detention facilities--harassed by guards, strip-searched, left for months without court hearings and finally released in the middle of the night on an empty street in downtown Long Beach.

INS officials deny there has been any mistreatment, saying that strict controls are necessary to protect both detainees and guards, but say they have released immigrants from their San Pedro facility.

One 20-year-old Sri Lankan detainee named Suresh recalled three months in detention during which he said he was treated more like a criminal than a seeker of asylum.

“I thought I was coming to a country where there would be hope,” said Suresh, one of several immigrants interviewed for this story who asked that their full names not be used because of concerns that the INS may take action against them. “Now, I am disappointed.”

The cause of the increase in the number of aliens such as Suresh attempting to enter the country is still a puzzle to INS officials.

Ongoing conflicts in countries such as Sri Lanka, India, China and Afghanistan certainly played a role. But the increase was so sudden, jumping from just 238 apprehensions last September to more than 1,300 in December, that officials discount that conflict alone is the cause.

Kenneth John Elwood, an INS assistant district director in Los Angeles, said what probably happened was that a slowly building influx reached the point where the detention facilities were overwhelmed, forcing the release of detainees to make room for each new wave of arrivals.

Elwood said word traveled back overseas that it was easy to win release in Los Angeles, sparking an even greater influx.

“Everything in life is timing,” Elwood said earlier this year. “You reach this takeoff stage that ignites this rush into this country and it accelerates just like a fire.”

The source of the new influx is a unique group of illegal immigrants known in the brusque language of immigration law as “excludable aliens.”

They are defined by the INS as aliens who arrive in this country by sea or air, as opposed to those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year by land.

It is a seemingly minor distinction, but one that allows the INS to treat both groups in significantly different ways. Those who come by land are apprehended on U.S. soil and thus have the right to be released after paying a bond to guarantee their appearance at a deportation hearing.

Excludable aliens are considered to have been apprehended outside the country and are not protected by the full range of constitutional rights, allowing the INS to hold them indefinitely.

Some are true refugees, fleeing war or civil strife. Others are so-called economic migrants, seeking an escape from poverty.

For whatever reason they came, their sudden arrival caught the INS off guard. INS staffers were forced to release the aliens, on bond or their own recognizance, almost as fast as they were apprehending them at the airport. “We’re just flogging ourselves right now,” one staffer said late last year. “What we’re doing is playing a silly game.”

Even the graffiti at one detention facility became decidedly upbeat. One message to newly arrived detainees read in Chinese: “For those of you who have come here, there is no need to be afraid. Victory is before you. In a day or two, you will be an American.”

The facilitators of the influx are a new breed of international coyotes who have built lucrative businesses in the human smuggling trade.

For Shankar, a 16-year-old Sri Lankan student, the journey began with a $10,000 payment to a smuggler who guaranteed entry to the United States.

Shankar was a Tamil who lived with his family in the lush northern lowlands near Jaffna, a city in the heart of the civil war between rebel Tamils and the Sinhalese-dominated government.

He never had been arrested by the government or threatened by the rebels, but his parents worried that as he grew older he would eventually be recruited by one side or the other.

His family was not rich, but they raised the $10,000 by selling all the family jewelry, including his mother’s thali , a ceremonial necklace that married women wear as long as their husbands are alive.

“I told my mother, ‘This is precious, don’t sell it,’ ” Shankar said. “She said, ‘No, you’re precious to me also.’ ”

Shankar and a cousin left Jaffna for the capital city of Colombo in late November. From there, they were accompanied by their “travel agent” to Singapore using their own Sri Lankan passports.

Their agent put the two cousins in a hotel room for three months as he arranged for the false passports and visas needed to get them past the airport inspectors whose job it is to make sure no one gets on a plane unless they can be legally admitted at their destination.

They were put on a flight for Los Angeles through Taipei. On board the plane, they destroyed their documents to avoid violating federal law on the use of fraudulent papers.

The cousins were easily caught at Los Angeles International Airport by INS inspectors and placed in detention.

Several immigration attorneys say the smuggling of immigrants from overseas has become such a thriving and sophisticated enterprise that some smuggling rings hold classes complete with Disneyland brochures.

The most powerful tool of the smugglers has been information from illegal immigrants, who can easily call back overseas and report the detention situation in Los Angeles.

“We have people coming from Karachi who know about a policy change in the INS three days ago,” the attorney said. “I have people coming through who are explaining the changes in the law to me. “

Tarik, a 28-year-old Pakistani who paid a smuggler $10,000 to bring him to the United States, said it was commonly known among his friends that Los Angeles was easy to enter because there was not enough detention space to hold people for very long.

“It was very well known for almost a year,” he said casually. “Some others we knew came and were released in two or three days, so we knew we would be too.”

It was soon after the December influx that the INS decided to stop releasing aliens and hold them as long as possible.

In the past, most excludable aliens were detained in Los Angeles at a privately run facility located in a converted motel on Alvarado Street.

While the accommodations were not luxurious, they were allowed to move freely about and stay with friends in rooms that maintained the flavor of a motel. There were even posters and televisions in the rooms. No one was strip-searched.

When the numbers were small, the 200-bed facility could hold most excludable aliens entering Los Angeles until they were either ordered out of the country or allowed to stay.

To handle the higher number of detainees, the agency began moving apprehended aliens to detention facilities in El Centro and San Pedro, which also held large numbers of criminal aliens.

“We were going to hold the line on detention for as long as we could,” Moschorak said.

The complaints of mistreatment soon followed.

The first group was made up of about 100 detainees from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China who were sent to the INS’ El Centro Service Processing Center--a flat, sprawling compound near the Mexican border and surrounded by high fences and barbed wire.

Suresh, the 20-year-old student from Sri Lanka, said he was never told how long he would be detained, what was going to happen to him or even where he was.

After his brief stay at the Alvarado Street facility, he said, he was stunned by what he found at El Centro.

Hardest to face was the grinding isolation and uncertainty, punctuated by moments of fear when he was near the criminal aliens detained at the same facility.

“I thought maybe it was better that I go back to Sri Lanka and die there,” he said.

The most serious incident to occur at El Centro involved a 40-year-old Brazilian mechanic named Jose Papa who was killed in a fight with a convicted drug dealer from Los Angeles.

Papa had arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 16 with a fake visa. He was no refugee seeking asylum, simply a mechanic looking for a better life in America.

On March 5, Papa got into a fight with the drug dealer, who punched him in the face, sending him tumbling onto the pavement. He died of head injuries six days later.

INS spokesman Rudy Murillo said that while there is an effort to separate detainees, the agency has no “hard-and-fast” rule.

“That’s the goal, but it’s not always the reality,” he said, explaining that crowding sometimes forces some mixing of criminals and excludable aliens.

He added that Papa’s alleged assailant, Benito Quinine Nevares, had two drug-related convictions, but no history of violence. “Look at the guy’s record,” Murillo said. “He wasn’t serving hard time.”

The INS paid to ship Papa’s body back to Brazil. He arrived two months after he left in search of a better life.

Only about 100 excludable aliens could be held at one time at El Centro because most of the space had to be used to hold criminal aliens. So it was with some relief that a brand-new, 400-bed detention center in San Pedro was opened by the INS in February.

The three-story, beige stucco San Pedro Service Processing Center was designed to be a state-of-the-art facility to house any type of detainee, from excludable aliens to criminals awaiting deportation.

There was no barbed wire, no guard towers. The cells for detainees were clean, gleaming open rooms with rows of beds, monitored from a sealed glass pod at one end.

But detainees said their treatment was severe and seemed to go beyond what was necessary to maintain security.

Ning, a 29-year-old Chinese graduate student, said that when he arrived, detainees were lined up with their feet apart and their heads down. He said the guards berated the new detainees in English, which few understood. He said some men began crying.

They were brought to a room where the prisoners were told to put their hands in their pockets and keep their eyes to the ground. Ning, and several others interviewed for this story, said they were then strip-searched.

“I was so mad,” he said. “What had we done? We thought we had legally applied for asylum. It had gone too far.”

Muslims complained that during the holy month of Ramadan, guards refused to allow them to save some food so they could eat after dusk to obey their annual fast.

Kumar, a 22-year-old student from Sri Lanka, was one of several held at San Pedro who described a practice of releasing detainees in the middle of the night by driving them to downtown Long Beach.

He said he and about 15 others were driven one night to downtown Long Beach after midnight and dropped off on an empty street. He said the group roamed the area for half an hour before a passing Indian cabdriver stopped and helped them find a telephone.

“We believe it was a very bad thing for them to do,” he said. “At least they could have shown us a telephone.”

John Bagley, the INS officer in charge of the San Pedro facility, denied many of the practices described by detainees.

Strip-searches are not allowed at the facility, he said. He added that no request for a special diet would be rejected, such as for Ramadan.

“This is probably one of the most compassionate facilities in the United States,” Bagley said.

As for releasing detainees in Long Beach, District Director Moschorak defended the practice, saying the agency has no obligation to transport detainees anywhere.

“The other alternative is to drop them at the front gate and say, ‘ Adios ,’ ” Moschorak said. “Taking them to Long Beach is to their advantage.”

Bagley said all releases are done before midnight. The detainees are brought to Long Beach because Terminal Island is usually deserted at night.

He said the Long Beach police are notified before every release, although Long Beach Police Sgt. Steve Laing, swing shift station commander, said he had never heard of such a thing.

“Being the station commander, I’m a little surprised,” he said. “No one has ever contacted me about it.”

Moschorak said there is no question that detainees are under much stricter control in El Centro and San Pedro than they are at the Alvarado Street facility.

But he said the tighter security is to protect detainees and guards at the facilities because of the high population of criminal aliens.

“It has to be a more controlled environment because the majority of people we hold are criminal aliens,” he said.

Moschorak said he believed the root of many complaints about El Centro and San Pedro was simply that people do not like to be detained--an undeniably unpleasant experience that tends to amplify complaints.

Moschorak said that detention was never meant to be a pleasant experience. “If people know that they are going to be locked up, that’s a big deterrent,” he said.

Since the INS began its stricter detention of excludable aliens, fewer aliens, in fact, have been apprehended in Los Angeles.

After 1,320 apprehensions in December, the number declined to 397 in March, but now has increased again--to 751 in April and a record 1,605 in May.

Those who were detained agree that they probably would not have come if they had known the nature of detention in the United States.

Suresh, of Sri Lanka, said that after being detained in Alvarado Street, El Centro and San Pedro he now would never recommend anyone come as he did.

“I’m never coming back,” Suresh said just before applying for political asylum in Canada. “I will definitely tell others, if you want to leave, go to Canada, but don’t go to America.”

Illegal Immigrants Detained at LAX

Here is a look at the number of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the country through Los Angeles International Airport who ere apprehended over the past three years. Figures are listed according to federal fiscal year: 1988-89* Total: 290 1989-90 Total: 1,453 1990-91** Total: 6,992 * Figures for Oct.-Dec. 1988 were unavailable. ** Year to date Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service