Detention at Sea Raises Health Concerns : Immigration: Conditions for 658 Chinese aboard ships off Baja coast are grim, U.S. officials say. Critics step up attack on U.S. policy.

The seven-day detention of Chinese immigrants on squalid smuggling ships off Baja California raises humanitarian concerns and illustrates the urgent need for immigration reforms, immigration experts said Tuesday.

As U.S. and Mexican diplomats discussed possible solutions, human rights and immigration reform advocates in both nations expressed fear for the well-being of the passengers crammed into three rusty vessels that the Coast Guard boarded last week near Ensenada. The sanitary conditions are grim, according to U.S. officials, who also described the mood of some of the weary immigrants as “downright nasty.”

Keeping the Chinese on the vessels while diplomatic options are being considered “risks subjecting them to inhumane conditions,” said Arthur C. Helton, director of the Refugee Project for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Although the Coast Guard has provided food and fresh water for the immigrants, U.S. authorities acknowledge the mounting danger of sickness or violence.

Regardless of how the case is resolved, the larger problem of seagoing illegal immigration requires fundamental legal and policy changes, observers said. The United States should not expect to use Mexico as a buffer against the illegal influx of Chinese immigrants, they said, noting that Mexico wants to avoid playing a politically risky role of acting as an arm of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“We feel that Mexico must energetically reject the role, which has been proposed, of becoming a systematic filter of undocumented migration or becoming the guardians of the American border,” said Antonio Garcia Sanchez of the Baja state human rights ombudsman’s office, which is active in immigration-related affairs.

The Clinton Administration asked Mexico to detain and send the 658 Chinese immigrants back in order to keep the Chinese from reaching U.S. territory and requesting asylum, which could allow them to remain in the country for years pending hearings.

Despite Mexico’s emphatic public rebuff of the request Monday, the State Department said Tuesday that high-level negotiations were continuing. Spokesman Mike McCurry said talks had reached a delicate stage. Other U.S. agencies declined to comment.

“We are continuing negotiations,” McCurry said. “Since we continue to hope there will be a resolution, we probably should continue to say they are constructive.”

But a real solution will only come when the U.S. government overhauls a slow and easily manipulated political asylum process, according to the director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“Mexico does not want to function as a private deportation agency for the U.S.,” said Dan Stein of the group, which advocates tightening immigration controls. “If this were to become a consistent practice, the Mexicans would have a legitimate objection. . . . The U.S. must take responsibility for its own borders. The solution is in the Congress and in the White House.”

Many politicians and interest groups are demanding legislation that would speed the asylum procedure and enable the INS to expel obviously bogus applicants after cursory reviews in airports and at sea.

The order for the Coast Guard to hold the three ships in international waters off Ensenada grows out of a hard-line policy on Chinese immigration announced by President Clinton last month. Immigration experts compared the Ensenada case to an incident in late 1991, when the Coast Guard detained Haitian boat people at sea for several weeks. But in that case, the fleeing Haitians were taken off their rickety crafts and held aboard a Coast Guard vessel.

Deteriorating psychological and physical conditions will make it increasingly difficult to determine if any of the Chinese immigrants are refugees with legitimate fears of political persecution, especially if they are interviewed at sea, Helton said. This is an inherent weakness in the Administration’s stepped-up interdiction approach, he said.

Under one unusual scenario reportedly being considered, the INS would interview asylum applicants on the vessels before they are repatriated by plane from Mexico.

And if Mexican or U.S. authorities screen the immigrants in Mexico, human rights advocates said, the United Nations should help evaluate asylum claims.

“We would encourage their involvement,” said Ken Roth, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t object in principle to the screening taking place in Mexico. . . . But they have to be brought into an environment where a reasonable, considered screening process can occur. Mexico cannot become a way station for summary and forcible deportation.”