Panic and Confusion Over a Deadline to Leave

Maria Diaz has lived in the United States for 26 years. She went to school here, and married here--twice. But she never applied for legal status here.

So, according to the government, she doesn’t exist.

Now, even though she is trying to obtain a green card, because of a phalanx of new immigration laws, she’s being told to leave her husband, her four children and her job and return to Mexico, a country she hasn’t seen since she was 4.

That is what tens of thousands of immigrants in Los Angeles may have to do in order to obtain legal residency in the U.S. It’s a situation that has sown anger, fear, anxiety and a large dose of confusion throughout the immigrant community. It’s driving some families apart, pushing others to the edge of mental breakdown and forcing impossibly difficult choices onto people who are, in many cases, just weeks or months away from becoming permanent legal residents. At its center are two mostly overlooked pieces of legislation.

The first, which took effect Sept. 27, is part of a sweeping immigration reform package signed by President Clinton last fall. It requires undocumented immigrants with pending green card applications to return to their homelands to await processing, which could take years. The intent of the law is to punish those who have lived here without legal status by barring those who leave from reentering the U.S. for three years. Those who remain here through April 1 will be barred for 10 years.

There was a loophole, however. A 1994 federal provision, known as 245 (i), allowed green card applicants to wait for processing in the U.S. by paying a $1,000 fine. That law, which was scheduled to expire last month, has been extended to Thursday. And while a second extension this week is possible, the ultimate fate of 245 (i), like that of many immigrants, remains uncertain. Those affected include undocumented immigrants who slipped across the border recently as well as people like Diaz, who have lived most of their lives here.

“A lot of people [are saying] ‘This can’t be happening. How can this possibly be real,’ ” says Sylvia Mora, an outreach worker with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), a nonprofit immigrant advocacy organization. “How can I possibly have to grab my children out of school, leave my house, my spouse. Go to a country where a lot of people don’t have relatives any more.

“It would just be horrible for them even to imagine having to leave and start over again.”

The law “sets up a weird incentive structure,” says CHIRLA’s Peder Thoreen. “In a lot of cases it probably makes more sense to just stay here and not ever worry about becoming legal because it’s an impossibility. It’s better than separating themselves from their families and their lives here.”

But don’t blame the government for separating families, says Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), long an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration.

“One of the most bogus arguments that has been made is that [we] want to divide families,” he says. “The division of families was made when the illegal act [of entering the U.S.] was committed. There is no one, no one we are talking about who is anything other than an illegal immigrant.

“If the first act that you commit in coming to this great country is an illegal one, what kind of statement does that make?”

Haydee Sanchez, director of Youth Empowerment Services, one of CHIRLA’s member organizations, says she knows of a number of families who have separated, unwillingly, to comply with the law. One woman, who has an application in for a green card, left her husband, a legal resident, 2 1/2 weeks ago and returned to Guatemala with her three children, all of whom are U.S. citizens.

“She was so confused,” Sanchez says. “Her husband is going to be a citizen very soon. She doesn’t want to break the law. This is a very, very difficult situation.”

To Gallegly, however, the application of the new laws is not mean-spirited, it’s simply a matter of fairness. The U.S. admitted approximately 1 million legal immigrants last year, more than any other country. Awarding green cards in Los Angeles to people who originally entered the country without permission means prospective immigrants who followed the legal procedures in their homeland may have to wait.

“We’re a nation of laws,” he says. “My belief is that you should not reward people that are in this country illegally. Why are we making it more convenient for somebody because they have broken the law? We shouldn’t be making an exception. We should be rewarding those who cross their t’s and dot their i’s and apply to come here legally.

“If you want to become legal, go back to your homeland and apply.”

But that’s often easier said than done. In fact, many of those affected are simply too overwhelmed to know what to do.

“Some of the people are coming in crying because it’s difficult for them to know exactly what’s going to happen next,” Sanchez says. “I’m referring clients at this point to psychologists or the community counseling center. And the others are being treated by social workers who are coming over here.”

The most common complaints are insomnia and anxiety, says psychotherapist Ana Deutsch, who has seen many of Sanchez’s referrals.

“The people I am seeing are people from Central America who have been here for a while and now they don’t know what is going to happen to them,” she says. “They are afraid of returning. Many of them came here in their late teens and have spent seven, eight, 10 years of their adult lives here. And they feel like this is uprooting them again.

“They managed to start a new life; making friends, going to school, having a job, buying a house or at least making a spot in the world for themselves. Now they’re threatened with losing that.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service shares a functional, nondescript office building on Los Angeles Street close to the Hollywood Freeway. In recent weeks, lines have begun forming outside its glass doors hours before dawn; by sunrise, several hundred people have often filled the dusty courtyard, many waiting simply to ask a question.

In such a climate, fear and uncertainty have made it easy for fraud to flourish. According to CHIRLA and other immigrants’ rights advocates, some unscrupulous lawyers and notaries have promised to cut through the government red tape and obtain green cards in a matter or weeks. In reality, many simply have taken the money and done nothing.

There have even been reports of travel agents getting in on the action, raising commissions on one-way tickets to Asia. In one case, immigrants paid for a bus trip to Reno, Nev., where they were wrongly told there were no lines and INS agents were standing by to present green cards.

“I think the highest levels of anxiety resulted mainly from misinformation,” says Thoreen, who has spent many mornings talking with those lined up outside the INS building. “Once they find out what’s going on, it is kind of this disbelief. They don’t know what to do. But at least they know what position they’re in. And that’s what they need mostly, just to know where they stand. Because there’s so much confusion.”

The task of sorting out that confusion has fallen largely to a few dozen community-based groups such as CHIRLA, One Stop Immigration, El Rescate, the Thai Development Center and the Central American Resource Center.

For the staff of CHIRLA, 10- to 12-hour days have become the norm in the past several weeks. The group’s drafty storefront offices just west of downtown have been flooded by an unprecedented volume of calls from panicked immigrants--at one point, a receptionist finished a brief phone conversation only to find her voicemail crammed with 30 new messages.

“You can come here at night and it’s like the middle of the day,” says Susan Alva, an attorney and the coordinator of CHIRLA’s immigration and citizenship project. “I’ve been doing this stuff for 25 years. I’ve never had to look so many people in the face [and say] ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you should do.’ ”

Yet, Alva appears mildly amused by some aspects of the crisis. The media, for example, who have conditioned themselves to think of immigration stories in terms of their impact on Latinos are just now beginning to learn that the new law is much more far-reaching. Alva tells of finishing an interview with a local TV reporter only to be peppered with more questions from the camera crew.

“The camera people, the tech crew, everyone was like ‘Omigod! I didn’t know this.’ They had family members from France, Israel, who were affected by this,” Alva says.

“Nobody had any idea that this was coming up to bite them on the butt or that it affected them. It was just so kind of incomprehensible because the very people it’s affecting are people who are in the process of immigrating. These are all people in the process of legalizing and who are eligible.

“They could have had the green cards but for [INS] backlogs,” Alva says. Those backlogs affect some 370,000 current citizenship applicants in Los Angeles alone. This also affects those seeking residency because citizenship applicants, once they are sworn in, can petition for permanent legal residency for immediate family members. Exasperated, Alva takes a deep breath, then smiles. What else can she do?

Meanwhile, down the narrow, carpeted stairway, in a paneled room just off the entrance to CHIRLA’s offices, Mora works the phones with two other women. Speaking quietly, mostly in Spanish, they offer advice, references, sometimes just a shoulder to cry on, and, most of all, hope.

“I think we’re going to see massive panic, anxiety and chaos once the new one-year time limit comes in April,” Mora says. “It’s not over. It’s going to get worse.”