ANAHEIM : INS Lists Advantages of New Asylum Site

An official of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said Thursday that Anaheim was selected as the site of the agency’s new asylum office because it has a vacant building large enough for the operation and is more convenient for applicants than the current Laguna Niguel location.

Duke Austin, the INS senior spokesman in Washington, also criticized immigrants’ rights groups who have filed a lawsuit attempting to force the INS to maintain an asylum office in downtown Los Angeles, where it was until a year ago.

Those groups say most local applicants are Salvadorans who live near downtown Los Angeles and are often unable to travel to Orange County. The lawsuit, filed last year, is still pending.

“I don’t want to sound hard or disinterested, but are they saying that the only way these people can get to their hearing is if we put the asylum office in their neighborhood?” Austin asked. “These people traveled all the way from Central America mostly and are in this country illegally, and now they can’t travel 20 more miles? That isn’t logical. No matter where we put the office, somebody will be inconvenienced.”

He said that since the asylum office moved to the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel, about 50% of asylum seekers have missed their appointments.

“But when we were in Los Angeles, the percentage was a couple points higher, so I don’t think the only problem these people have with getting to their asylum appointments is the location of the asylum office,” Austin said.

Madeline Janis, executive director of the Central American Refugee Center, a Los Angeles group that is one of the parties suing the INS, said 100,000 asylum applicants reside in Los Angeles and that their attorneys, most of whom donate their time, have their offices there.

“The (asylum seekers) are an impoverished group of people, most of whom don’t speak English, and you’re asking them to be at a 9 a.m. meeting, which requires a two- or three-hour bus ride,” she said. “You are also asking their attorneys, who are working (for free), to give up at least four or five hours of their time to go to Orange County for a hearing.”

She also contradicted Austin’s claim that there was no increase in the no-show rate when the office moved to Laguna Niguel from Los Angeles.

“Somebody in INS told me that the actual no-show rate in Los Angeles was between 20% and 30%,” Janis said.

The asylum office, which will be at Broadway and Anaheim Boulevard, is scheduled to open in June. There will be 94 employees and 51 asylum officers working there. About 120 hearings will be scheduled at the office daily.

“In downtown L.A., the office was too small for the amount of people who were coming through,” Austin said. “This new office will be able to handle them better.”

Asylum officers interview immigrants who claim to have come to this country to escape political, religious or ethnic persecution. If the officer finds a claim to be legitimate, the applicant can stay. If the claim is rejected, the applicant can be deported unless he or she can convince a judge of otherwise being qualified to stay.

Austin also said applicants who miss their appointment are not automatically deported nor do they lose their right to apply for asylum.

“If they call us, we reschedule their appointment,” he said. “If they don’t contact us and we capture them a year from now working illegally, they can reapply for asylum. That is one of the big problems with the asylum program.”