Reno Hints at Major Reforms at INS, Calls for ‘Strong’ Chief

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno on Thursday signaled sweeping changes in the Immigration and Naturalization Service and said she hopes that President Clinton next week will name “a strong, experienced” commissioner to head the beleaguered agency.

Reno has recommended the appointment of Doris M. Meissner, whose immigration experience dates to 1974 and who was acting commissioner during the Ronald Reagan Administration, government sources said.

Meissner, 51, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, left the INS in July, 1986, after three years as executive associate commissioner. During the Gerald R. Ford Administration, she was executive director of the Cabinet Committee on Illegal Aliens, which did much of the work that led to enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act a decade later.

Reno, speaking to the Anti-Defamation League’s national commission here, said that she had “spent considerable time” working on the recommendation to Clinton.

“The balance between maintaining the tradition of this nation as a nation of immigrants versus the recognition of the burden that immigration has imposed on so many public services around this country is going to be one of the most sensitive issues that I work through,” Reno said.

In the past, the INS has been treated as “a stepchild” of the Justice Department, Reno said, and only over the last 19 months have efforts been made to upgrade management criteria in the agency.

Despite the efforts, “we have a long way to go in terms of getting it automated, in terms of developing new creative and current management styles,” the attorney general said.

One of the first steps she took was to start a review of the INS’ asylum and deportation hearing process, procedures that have drawn sharp criticism from Sens. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), both of whom have drawn up legislation to streamline the process.

Under current asylum arrangements, immigrants are able to gain entry to the United States by invoking what Simpson has sarcastically called the magic word “asylum” and then to remain free pending hearings that do not take place for a year or more because of an agency backlog. Often, the asylum-seekers fail to appear when hearings are scheduled.