Pattern of Conflict : Immigration: Critics charge that the INS raids waste manpower and pad statistics. The agency defends the tactic as effective in deterring firms from hiring illegal aliens.

Barely an hour into his day’s tedious work, Esteban Reyes had sewn buttonholes in the waistbands of 60 pairs of trousers when federal immigration agents stormed the red-brick garment factory south of downtown.

As the agents moved swiftly among workers, Reyes nervously protested that he was from El Salvador. Still, the blond, blue-coated agent was skeptical and ordered Reyes’ detention.

With 32 other workers, Reyes was placed, hands-up, against the side of a green and silver Justice Department bus, searched, his belt removed and his pockets emptied. He boarded the bus and peered out the barred windows as he and the others were transported to the underground holding cells of the Immigration and Naturalization Service--and to certain deportation.

But Reyes was saved by a new escape hatch in the immigration system. Eventually able to persuade agents of his Salvadoran origins, Reyes was freed and returned to the streets of Los Angeles.

Every month in Southern California, scores of Salvadorans and Guatemalans similarly avoid deportation. New laws and court rulings have spelled freedom for many illegal immigrants who, a year ago, would have been almost automatically returned to their native countries.

These exceptions to the rule are being noted as the INS dramatically steps up the number of raids it conducts on illegal immigrants, sweeping into garment factories and onto the street corners where day workers are hired.

Yet critics contend the raids waste time and money while doing little to stop illegal immigration--especially since a number of those caught are ultimately released. The critics charge the INS is using the raids to pad statistics and fend off efforts in Congress to repeal employer-sanctions legislation.

INS officials respond that the number of detainees who are released is still small, and, more importantly, the raids send a loud warning to employers against hiring illegal aliens.

“The raids are very effective,” INS Deputy District Director John Brechtel said. “All you have to do is talk to an employer who’s been raided. . . . It’s the last thing they want.”

Fines levied against employers who hire illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County have nearly doubled in the last year, to slightly more than $800,000, Brechtel said.

But others argue that while the raids have become more frequent, they have become less effective and represent the wrong way to allocate scarce resources. The special treatment that must be given Central Americans has raised additional questions, since it further complicates the way raids are carried out by bogging down overwhelmed INS agents in additional red tape.

“Look at the manpower used in a raid, and then they walk away with 20 people; the expense and time (are) definitely questionable,” said Niels Frenzen, an attorney with Public Counsel who is involved in a lawsuit that emerged from an INS sweep where most of the Guatemalan workers arrested had to be released.

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who live and work in Southern California are eligible for an exempt status that allows them to avoid deportation: Salvadorans who entered the United States before Sept. 19, 1990, may seek temporary safe haven under the 1990 Immigration Act; Guatemalans here before Oct. 1, 1990, may obtain work permits as a result of a precedent-setting lawsuit last year that forced the INS to reopen political asylum cases.

While many of the Central Americans who get caught up in the raids are eventually released under these new provisions, that freedom often comes only after a long day of lost wages, tedium, confusion and fear.

On the day Esteban Reyes was arrested and released, he was not the only Central American caught in the INS dragnet.

Mercedes Quintanilla, a curly-haired 25-year-old from the Usulutan region of El Salvador, left her home in Lynwood at 6:30 that morning and began work at one of the factory’s sewing machines at 7:30.

Quintanilla earns 10 cents for each hem she stitches onto an assembly line of shorts and denim pants. On a good day, she can complete 400 pairs of shorts or 250 pairs of pants.

This would not be a good day.

“My sister-in-law always told me if the migra came, I should flee,” Quintanilla said. “But when they got here, there was no way out.”

The immigration agents, armed with standard-issue .357-magnum revolvers, blocked all the exits at the Stephen Bae Fashions clothing manufacturer in Vernon, a cavernous place crowded with rows of sewing machines and racks of stiff blue jeans. The agents served a search warrant and then asked each worker for documents.

Salvadorans and Guatemalans who have applied for protection under the new rules are supposed to carry a permit that says they are entitled to work. About 10 Central-American workers possessed and presented such cards, and the agents let them go.

Quintanilla did not have the card. Her papers, she insisted, were “ en tramite “--still being processed. This explanation did not satisfy the men and women with INS blazoned on their backs, and Quintanilla was rounded up with other workers.

The raid was over in less than an hour. Reyes, Quintanilla and the others had been searched and placed on the bus, and it pulled away.

Dressed in blue bicycle pants and a white “Hollywood” T-shirt, Quintanilla nervously held hands with another woman who rode in the front of the bus. The men rode in the back.

“I don’t know if they’ll send me back or let me stay,” Quintanilla told a reporter who accompanied the group. Then she sounded a tentative note of hope: “They say they’re not deporting Salvadorans these days. We’ll see. I guess I’ll be the test.”

Quintanilla had studied in El Salvador to become a nurse, but civil war there interrupted her education and made finding work difficult. She paid a coyote in 1989 to smuggle her across Mexico into the United States, and she began working at Stephen Bae Fashions six months ago.

After a 20-minute ride, the tone on the bus hushed as it pulled into the darkened loading dock underneath the Federal Building on Los Angeles Street. Reality began to sink in.

In single file, the women, and then the men, were marched inside the detention facility to await booking. Watching over the group was INS Special Agent Joe Aguirre.

Employed by the INS for three years, Aguirre, 29, was born and raised in Chihuahua, the son of a Mexican farmhand brought into the United States as a bracero, or guest worker. Twenty years ago, Aguirre moved here with his 10 siblings and later obtained U.S. citizenship.

“My background helps me understand where they’re coming from,” Aguirre said of the people he was now processing. “It brings the fear level down. They open up to me more.”

The men and women, in separate groups, were taken to holding tanks, large graffiti-scarred rooms with two pay telephones and two metal toilets partially concealed behind swinging wooden doors. Seven holding tanks ring the windowless processing room where the fates of hundreds of foreign-born are decided daily.

One story underground, the processing room is filled with a constant din: nonstop chatter in several languages; the occasional banging on the walls from detained men; the staccato of an old portable typewriter, used by an agent to fill out forms. On one bulletin board hangs a calendar with pictures of Ellis Island.

It is at the agents’ discretion, after asking questions in mostly beginner’s Spanish, that they believe a person is telling the truth about his or her nationality.

For Reyes, it was quick. Agents verified he had applied for asylum, and he was released.

It would take longer for Quintanilla and a Guatemalan woman, Debora Galicia. Agents must open a file for all people claiming to be from El Salvador or Guatemala who have not applied for protected status. The agents gave the two women long explanations of their rights, lists of lawyers and a battery of forms.

Nearly a dozen forms were filled out for each woman by the time it was over, their names finally added to the asylum-application system.

Fingerprints taken and papers in hand, Quintanilla and Galicia were released four hours after their odyssey had begun. The two women walked out of detention, up a steep driveway from underneath the Federal Building and out onto Aliso Street above the roar of the 101 Freeway.

“I do not understand a single thing,” Galicia, 20, said. “They let us go. Why?”

“Thank God they did,” Quintanilla said. “This is something that makes you feel very nervous and desperate.”

Still stunned, the pair wandered toward the nearest bus stop, searching for a way home.

Mexican nationals still constitute the majority of workers hauled in during raids, and they are routinely deported to Tijuana. Brechtel said the number of Central Americans released after raids in September averaged just 9% of the total number of those arrested.

But immigrant rights advocates, who recently reactivated a long-dormant “INS Raids Task Force” to educate workers, argue that scarce INS resources would be better spent instructing employers and processing legitimate work permits.

For years, Central Americans who were arrested often tried to claim they were Mexican. Getting shipped to Tijuana was not as bad as a return trip to their more distant home countries. From Tijuana, they, like tens of thousands of Mexicans, could easily attempt the dash back into the United States.

It became common to see Central Americans--especially Guatemalans and Salvadorans--practice disguising their distinctive accents and brush up on facts an immigration officer was likely to ask, such as the color of the Mexican flag and the names of Mexican states.

Now, agents sometimes run across pretenders to Salvadoran or Guatemalan birthrights.

“We had a case where, in the field, they claimed to be Mexicans,” Special Agent Yolanda Magdaleno said. “Once they got here (into INS offices), they wanted to be Guatemalans.”

Agents were processing the group as Guatemalans when it became clear that none qualified for the protected status; then, Magdaleno said, they wanted to change back to being Mexicans.

INS agents maintain the added steps required in processing Guatemalans and Salvadorans are all part of the job. But several can scarcely conceal the frustration they feel in seeing that the time and effort they put into raids seems to have little impact on stopping illegal immigration or in preventing businesses from hiring undocumented workers.

“We leave (a factory that has been raided), and it’s back to business as usual,” said Special Agent Norris Potter. “Every time we do a raid . . . (we) work our butts off . . . and the only thing that happens to the employer is he loses some money. . . . It’s useless.”

The frustration, senior officials say, is to be expected.

“Frustration . . . has been part of this job as long as I’ve been doing it . . . 25 years,” said Supervisory Special Agent A. G. Laverty. “It’s no more, no less, than policemen who capture (criminals), and (the criminals) get turned out fast. There’s a lot of illegals, and it just goes on and on.”

That aside, Laverty defended the staging of raids as a valuable psychological deterrent.

“There’s a message there,” Laverty said, “that’s not lost on anybody.”