Suit Challenges INS Actions on Workers : Immigration: It claims agents use faulty records and unconstitutional search warrants. INS officials say the courts have settled the issues.

A lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday alleges that INS agents use grossly inaccurate records to determine if immigrants are working legally in this country and have forced businesses to fire legal immigrants since employer sanctions went into effect in 1987.

The suit, which names the commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Gene McNary, as a defendant, also challenges the constitutionality of warrants that agents use to search for illegal workers. It was filed in San Diego on behalf of two clothing manufacturing firms and nine of their workers who the suit contends were improperly arrested in an INS raid last year.

If class-action status for the lawsuit is granted, greater protections for all employers and employees in the United States could result, said Peter N. Larrabee, a San Diego lawyer. Larrabee and lawyers for the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law represent the plaintiffs.

“We are not trying to get rid of the warrants because there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose for them,” Larrabee said. “But we are trying to obtain proper restrictions.”

INS spokesman Joe Flanders said Wednesday that similar issues have been raised before in the courts, but referred The Times to an INS official in Washington for further comment. That official could not be reached.

Larrabee acknowledged that the INS warrants were unsuccessfully challenged in court in the 1970s but said those challenges came before implementation of employer sanctions, which penalize businesses for hiring people who cannot legally work in the United States.

“Today you have a whole different situation,” he said. “We don’t believe those warrants are constitutional.”

The lawsuit contends that, unlike other warrants for search or arrest, INS warrants allow agents unlimited access to a business without specifying locations or individuals and give them the power to take people into custody who are not specifically named.

The accuracy of INS records, he said, has never been challenged in court.

He contended that INS agents routinely tell employers that immigrants are not certified to work in this country when, in fact, they are. As a result, “innocent people get fired,” he said.

When the agency serves notice to an employer on an employee’s eligibility-to-work status, he added, “the basis of that notice (should) be impeccable. Either the record system they use is so poor it is unreliable or their agents are not checking the records.”

The lawsuit cites cases at Mountain High Knitting and Mountain High Hosiery, both in San Diego, after the INS raided the firms in January, 1991.

During the raid, 16 people were arrested and accused of working illegally in this country, according to the lawsuit. Eight of them were authorized to work, the suit contends.

Later, the INS informed the firms in a letter that 15 other employees were working illegally and threatened to fine the owners. The firms, fearful of the sanctions, fired three.

Eventually, 11 of the 15, including the three who were fired, were found to be authorized to work, the lawsuit contends.