Gallegly Calls On Reno to Investigate INS Handling of Sweatshop Case : Immigration: The Simi congressman in a letter to the attorney general threatens hearings while accusing the agency of mishandling the matter.

Threatening congressional hearings if action is not taken, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) called on Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to investigate her agency’s handling of the case involving Thai immigrants held under slave-like conditions at an El Monte sweatshop.

Accusing the INS of mishandling the matter, Gallegly expressed anger at reports that immigration officials suspected illegal activity at the facility years before the case finally broke earlier this month.

“It is my hope that your careful and thorough review of INS policies, procedures and personnel will allow us to avoid formal congressional hearings on the performance of the agency,” Gallegly, a member of the judiciary subcommittee on immigration and claims, wrote in a letter to Reno. “To be blunt, I want to get to the bottom of what’s going wrong with the INS.”

Gallegly, a crusader against illegal immigration, has also criticized the Immigration and Naturalization Service on that matter.

Seizing on the El Monte issue Thursday was California Gov. Pete Wilson, who said in a separate letter to Reno that “the nation has a right to know why the Clinton Administration allowed slavery to exist for years in the United States and ignored it.”

Reno said through a spokeswoman that she is reviewing the matter, but she stopped short of calling for an investigation of the INS handling of the case. “The circumstances of this case are of deep concern to the attorney general,” spokeswoman Ana Cobian said. “The nine individuals will be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible.”

Eight of the alleged operators of the El Monte facility, where authorities say Thai immigrants were forced to work in slave-like conditions, pleaded not guilty earlier this week to charges that they concealed and harbored more than 70 illegal immigrants. A ninth suspect, accused of helping recruit workers in Thailand, is still at large.

An INS agent contended in papers filed with the government that in 1991 his supervisors prevented him from investigating sewing shops that may have been using forced Thai labor. The INS closed its investigation of the El Monte sweatshop in 1992 when officials were unable to gather sufficient evidence to persuade federal prosecutors to apply for a search warrant of the premises.

“The INS has just fallen down on the job too many times for us to blindly continue down our current path, taking halfhearted solace in the belief that things may be getting better,” Gallegly wrote. “I am frankly beginning to think of the INS as the federal agency that has fallen down so often it cannot get up.”

Gallegly’s letter to Reno is not his first tangle with the INS. He has been a vocal critic of the agency and its effectiveness in clamping down on illegal immigration.

After he led a delegation of congressional representatives to an INS facility in Miami earlier this year, Gallegly successfully urged Reno to investigate reports that INS administrators had attempted to deceive the visiting lawmakers by making conditions look better than they were. That review by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office is pending.

Despite expressing regret that the Thai nationals were allowed to suffer so long under such grim conditions--18-hour workdays in a facility surrounded by barbed wire--Gallegly said in an interview that the victims should be deported like others in the country without permission.

“There is absolutely no question that these poor women are absolutely victims,” he said. “But at the same time, if they had not illegally entered the country, they would not have been victims in that sweatshop. We don’t have any choice in this case than to return them to their homeland.”