Judge Refuses to Void Lawsuit Against INS

In a case that grew out of complaints from jailed illegal immigrants awaiting deportation in Los Angeles, a federal judge in California has rejected the government’s bid to dismiss a class-action challenge to the way that the Immigration and Naturalization Service treats its growing population of prisoners.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon in Sacramento opens the way for a potentially landmark civil trial on contentious issues such as access to medical attention, legal assistance, exercise and telephones in more than 500 detention facilities nationwide used by @the INS.

The decision comes at a time when the agency is locking up more and more people under a get-tough policy stemming from last year’s congressional overhaul of immigration law. Congress mandated detention of many in deportation and other proceedings who could previously be released while awaiting the outcome of their cases.

In the last decade or so, the INS has almost tripled its detention space, to 11,500 beds nationwide, using a combination of federal lockups, local jails and private detention facilities operated under INS contracts. Los Angeles-area beds have doubled to almost 1,000 since February, when the INS began leasing 500 beds from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Mira Loma jail in Lancaster, relieving pressure at the INS’ 450-bed facility in San Pedro.

The INS plans continued lockup expansion as the agency accelerates its push toward more deportations and detentions.

“There is a definite need for additional detention space,” said INS spokesman Russ Bergeron.

The judge’s 31-page decision, received by lawyers Friday, rejected Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s motion to throw the lawsuit out before trial for lack of evidence. There was no immediate word on possible appeals.

Kenyon did dismiss challenges to a number of contested policies, including rules governing solitary confinement, visitation and release on bond. But the judge allowed other central issues--from the quality of medical and dental care to access to telephones and exercise facilities--to proceed to trial.

Among the lead plaintiffs in the 1994 case are two former San Pedro inmates--Faiq Marrogi Kattola, an Iraqi who said he was exposed to physical assaults and contagious diseases while being denied adequate access to legal materials; and Yerwamt Vartanian, an Armenian who alleged that he was given Tylenol for a heart attack suffered at the Terminal Island lockup.

In the case of Vartanian, the lawsuit states that he also requested dental care while in custody at San Pedro and was told that facility overseers only authorized “pullouts,” or extractions. A Nigerian man with a spinal injury was denied a wheelchair while in INS custody in Georgia and forced to crawl in his cell for several months, the lawsuit alleges.

The government has denied any wrongdoing. INS officials defend the adequacy of their lockup practices.

“The people are treated humanely and with dignity,” said Leonard Kovensky, assistant INS district director for detention and deportation in Los Angeles, who declined to comment on the lawsuit. “Their basic needs are either met or exceeded.”

Critics charge that INS detention polices are flawed and out of date and that they lack uniformity. Although state and federal agencies produce multivolume documents governing jail practices, detractors say the INS guidelines amount to a hodgepodge put together 15 years or so ago and implemented in varying fashion from facility to facility.

One of the aims of the lawsuit, said Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, the Los Angeles-based group that brought the national challenge, is to force the INS to institute standardized detention guidelines.

Inadequate procedures and agency oversights, critics charge, have contributed to explosive situations like the 1995 riot at a privately operated jail in New Jersey that had a contract with the INS.