INS Seeks to Move Immigrant Hearing Center to Anaheim

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service wants to move its main immigrant asylum hearing center to downtown Anaheim, possibly as soon as March, according to city officials and immigrant-rights activists.

Anaheim officials on Wednesday said the INS has informed them that it wants to move the asylum hearing offices that serve Orange and Los Angeles counties from Laguna Niguel and Los Angeles to a building at Anaheim Boulevard and Broadway, across the street from City Hall. About 300 hearings a day would take place there for immigrants seeking asylum.

The move, city officials said, has raised concerns that parking and traffic problems would increase in the already jammed downtown area. Activists have added that it would create an unfair burden for the region’s large immigrant population.

Elisa Stipkovich, Anaheim’s redevelopment director, said she and City Manager James D. Ruth have been told little by INS officials about the proposal, except that a tentative site has been selected.

“We don’t know what kind of operations they will set up,” she said. “But we are trying to arrange a meeting to find out how parking will be handled down there. That is our biggest concern.”

Rosemary Melville, the INS asylum director for Los Angeles and Orange counties, said a new hearing office is being sought but refused to confirm that the Anaheim site has been chosen. But a refugee counselor who, like other immigrant-rights activists wants the hearing center to remain in Los Angeles, said INS officials have told him the move to Anaheim is set and will take place in March.

Melville said that wherever the new center is located, it will handle about 30 hearings an hour.

“That’s less traffic than a 7-Eleven,” she said. “All that this will be is a hearing center. People who are seeking information or basic facts about asylum will be directed to our offices in Westminster or Los Angeles. I just want people to know that no matter where we locate the center, we want to be good neighbors.”

The centers currently located in Los Angeles and Laguna Niguel are the sites of hearings for immigrants seeking asylum from political, ethnic or religious persecution in their homeland.

If an officer finds their fears to be legitimate, they are granted asylum and allowed to stay in the United States. Those whose claims are denied are ordered to leave the country unless they can convince an appeals judge that they are otherwise qualified for residency. Missing the hearing can be grounds for deportation.

Until last April, people seeking asylum had their hearings in downtown Los Angeles. But in an attempt to upgrade the quality of its offices, the INS decided to move the hearing center.

“We didn’t want to go through training people . . . and then they show up and say ‘God, I can’t stand the neighborhood’ and leave,” Melville said at that time.

The agency tried last spring to move to Buena Park, but its rental deal fell through at the last minute. The INS then moved the bulk of its hearings to the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel, leaving just a few to be heard in Los Angeles.

The move to Orange County and the apparent decision to move hearing offices here permanently has infuriated refugee groups, who say the bulk of the 40,000 immigrants seeking asylum in the region are Salvadorans who live near downtown Los Angeles.

“They are placing an undue burden on the refugees to get to their hearing,” said E.J. Flynn, legal director of the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles. He said INS officials have told him that the Anaheim move will be completed in March.

“The INS is asking people who in many cases do not speak English to take a complicated bus trip to Anaheim,” he said. “All we are asking is that the INS asylum processing center be located in Los Angeles.”

Anaheim Mayor Fred Hunter, whose law office is a block from the proposed site for the hearing center, said he is not opposed to the INS’s coming to Anaheim, but that the area near City Hall is already overburdened by an excess of traffic and a dearth of parking.

“If they’ll just work with the city, we’ll find them a better location,” Hunter said. “There are buildings in the industrial part of town that would be perfect.”

But City Atty. Jack L. White told the City Council on Tuesday that if the INS wants to move to the downtown building, there is little the city can do to prevent it, even though it is unlikely the operation would comply with city standards for available parking spaces and other zoning restrictions.

He said the federal government by law exempts itself from local building laws and ordinances.