INS to Query the Employers Who Hired Drywall Crews : Labor: Investigators say striking immigrants who were arrested have provided leads.

A federal Immigration and Naturalization Service official said Monday that INS officers interviewed 52 striking drywall workers in custody over the weekend and intend to use the information to investigate some of the men’s employers.

“They’ve given us a lot of real solid leads,” said John Brechtel, assistant director for investigations at the agency’s Los Angeles office.

It was more bad news for the drywall industry, which has been crippled for six weeks by an estimated 1,000 strikers demanding a union and higher wages in Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties.

The men were among 153 strikers arrested nearly two weeks ago on a felony charge of conspiracy to commit kidnaping. Sheriff’s deputies said the men were arrested after forcing six drywall workers to leave a Mission Viejo construction site.

Prosecutors later reduced the charges to trespassing and dropped the charges altogether against more than 40 men.

The men, all Mexican immigrants, complain that wages haven’t risen in 10 years. And since the drywall companies began lowering wages two years ago, when the real estate downturn hit, they say they’re now paid as little as $300 a week.

Despite those low wages, a majority of the 52 men questioned by the INS said they’ve been in the United States only a short time, some of them less than a year.

During what agency officials say was a routine jailhouse screening, the INS identified 86 of the men arrested in Mission Viejo as probably being in the country illegally. Of those, 74 had been released from jail in Orange County and right into INS custody Friday.

Fourteen of those men finally produced valid “green cards” permitting them to be in the country legally and were released. Later eight more men were found to have applications for citizenship pending or other legal reason to be in the United States.

Of the remaining 52 in INS custody, about three-quarters agreed to tell INS agents which drywall companies had employed them.

Bond was set over the weekend in amounts up to $1,500. Few men had been able to raise bond by Monday, Brechtel said. But at least half of the 52 had already asked through their lawyers that they be allowed to skip formal deportation hearings and be deported back to Mexico voluntarily, he said.

Meanwhile, the INS still has “holds” on 12 of the 17 men still awaiting trial in the Orange County Jail. Once their cases have wound through the courts, they too will be picked up by the INS for deportation proceedings.

The Pacific Rim Drywall Assn. “does not condone a contractor violating any laws,” said Bob Sato, a Newbury Park drywall company executive and president of the trade group. For the INS, meanwhile, simply knowing who employed the men does not make a prosecutable case. The INS has to prove an employer knowingly hired an illegal immigrant or continued to employ one after learning of his status.

That sometimes makes cases hard to prove, the INS said.

Employers, for instance, are required to see two forms of identification for every new employee, typically a driver’s license and a Social Security card. But unless the ID is a flagrant forgery, under federal law the employer isn’t required to check whether the ID is valid. “Like other employers, if a document appears valid, there’s not much we can do,” Sato said.

An employer can be fined from $250 to $2,000 for a first offense and up to $10,000 for a third offense. And if the INS can prove that an employer repeatedly and knowingly hired illegal immigrants, it can bring criminal charges with a fine of up to $3,000 and a prison term of six months.

This isn’t the first time the industry has attracted official attention. State and federal tax officials said with much fanfare in 1989 that they were going to investigate the drywall industry for paying workers in cash in order to circumvent state and federal taxes. But evidence proved hard to come by and little came of the investigation, officials said.

Also on Monday, the drywall companies’ customers--the region’s powerful home building industry--said incidents of violence and vandalism continued at job sites around the region.

The home builders’ trade group held a press conference Friday to denounce the strikers, showing a several-week-old video from an Aliso Viejo construction site that showed strikers breaking windows in new homes.