INS Agents Suggested Rampart Deportations

Immigration and Naturalization Service agents working with Los Angeles Police Department detectives explicitly recommended deporting alleged 18th Street gang members against whom criminal cases could not be made, according to federal documents.

“In cases where criminal prosecution cannot be sustained, proceedings will be initiated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove the individual from the United States,” said a draft plan drawn up by INS’ Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in 1997.

Dissident INS agents say the heavy reliance on deportations led to numerous abuses of immigrants’ civil rights, as well as to violations of a 21-year-old city policy that bars LAPD officers from initiating a police action to determine whether people are legally in the United States. The policy is considered crucial in persuading immigrants not to be afraid to report crimes or to come forward as witnesses, because it helps remove the fear of deportation.

According to the documents obtained by The Times, the FBI’s Violent Gang Unit began investigating the 18th Street gang in 1993, working with LAPD officers. In 1998, the FBI, eager for more help from the INS, described the 18th Street gang as a narcotics trafficking organization significant enough to maintain “international connections with Mexican and Colombian cartels”--an allegation that no federal agency ever has substantiated.

The FBI also characterized the 18th Street gang as the “enforcement arm” of California’s brutal Mexican Mafia, a group the FBI compared to the Sicilian Mafia and successfully prosecuted in 1997 under anti-racketeering laws. But the FBI never built a case that the lethal but anarchic 18th Street gang was a major organized crime entity, though a federal investigation is still pending. INS cases reviewed by The Times suggest that many alleged gang members are pursued on immigration rather than criminal charges.

Los Angeles FBI chief James DeSarno said the FBI referred suspects to the INS only after they were charged with criminal offenses.

“If someone was charged criminally and their INS status was in question,” DeSarno said, “we would refer them to INS.”

The FBI does not make the point entirely clear in its 1998 request for the cooperation of INS organized crime experts.

The FBI prosecution strategy lists four drug and criminal conspiracy laws that can be used to prosecute gang members. It then enumerates 14 immigration provisions--from illegal reentry after deportation to “failure of alien to have in his possession and carry with him an alien registration receipt card”--that can be used “in addition, against those individuals who qualify for the attention of INS.”

DeSarno said that if gang members were charged with crimes, “then we would also look at the immigration status.”

The federal documents obtained by The Times raise a critical local question: Did the LAPD’s anti-gang officers use their collaboration with federal agencies to circumvent the city’s Special Order 40, which bans police action initiated solely on immigration status? If the LAPD was, in fact, violating that order, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg said, “15 years of people convincing immigrants that they can call the police will be destroyed overnight. And if that happens, part of the city will become unpoliceable.”

Seeking a Probe of Alleged Collusion

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) met Thursday with INS Commissioner Doris Meissner to discuss an INS investigation prompted by an earlier Times report that INS officers may have improperly colluded with the LAPD to deport immigrants.

“I am deeply disturbed,” Roybal-Allard said. “I am commissioning the Government Accounting Office to begin an independent, neutral investigation of the allegations concerning INS and the FBI’s supposed collusion with the LAPD.”

The FBI’s request for the help of INS experts in “Operation 18th Street” was approved by the INS’ Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in March 1998.

In fact, by June 1997, according to the dissident INS agents, their agency’s task force was already enmeshed in an anti-gang strategy that they believed over-relied on deporting suspected gang members who were in the country illegally.

That program, the INS documents and agents say, involved direct communication on immigration cases between INS agents and the LAPD’s troubled Rampart Division anti-gang CRASH unit.

Using laws not directly aimed at racketeering to attack organized crime is not unusual. The infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone was imprisoned on tax evasion charges, as were a number of suspected cocaine traffickers in Miami more recently.

In the case of the 18th Street gang, documents suggest that scrutiny of suspects’ immigration status became a secondary line of inquiry.

“A review of gang databases maintained by local law enforcement reveals that over 15,000 individuals have been identified as claiming membership in the 18th Street gang,” the FBI proposal alleged. “Additionally, approximately 8,000 known and suspected 18th Street gang members have been identified through INS indices.

“Those other law enforcement databases are being reviewed to discern whether these individuals meet the prosecution guidelines established by the United States Attorney’s office,” said the document, which is marked “limited official use.”

FBI agents and LAPD officers work together against gangs on the Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Crime--a multi-agency partnership that exists in numerous cities plagued by gang violence, FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley said.

Dissidents Claim Threat Exaggerated

The local task force includes officers from the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and other regional law enforcement agencies, she said.

Dissident INS agents say the FBI’s proposal for cooperation was accepted because it exaggerated the significance of the large but loosely organized 18th Street gang and its ties to serious organized crime. The INS agents said they did not believe the gang justified the attention of their agency’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.

The agents were skeptical of claims by the FBI and the INS that they had identified thousands of suspected gang members.

The FBI claim of a database of 15,000 self-described 18th Street gang members was “pulled out of the sky by the FBI . . . to boost their claim that they had a major, major operation there to be dealt with,” a senior INS agent said.

“Some countries around the world don’t have 8,000 members in their armed forces,” he said, referring to the 8,000 known and suspected 18th Street gang members supposedly listed in “INS indices.”

The critical INS agents said they believed that immigration files were being misused by law enforcement officers to go after law-abiding citizens--some of them former gang members--who were in the country illegally.

For example, Tony Alvarado, a twice-deported illegal immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles since he was 18 months old, said in an interview that he has been picked up twice by LAPD officers and taken to speak with FBI agents who told him he could stay in the country--if he agreed to become an informant on gang crimes.

As a youth, Alvarado, 28, had been a member of a Pacoima gang, Project Boyz, but is now a married father and homeowner who says he has cut any ties to gang life.

‘I’m a Family Man’

In August, he said, LAPD officers picked him up in Pacoima, claiming falsely that he had a broken automobile windshield, and took him to speak with two FBI agents.

“The FBI agent is telling me the reason they’re there is I’ve been deported before and I’m breaking the law for illegal entry,” Alvarado said. “They’re telling me how I could be able to stay in the United States, if I was willing to work with them.

“They wanted to know about gang activity and whatever violence was going out there,” he said. “I told them, I’m out of that lifestyle. I don’t know what’s going on in the streets. I’m a family man.”

He was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center until December, when a judge granted him bail, saying that Alvarado did not appear to be a threat to society and that it was hard to consider him a flight risk because he had returned home to Los Angeles both times U.S. authorities deported him, according to Alvarado’s attorney, David Katz.

But INS agents picked him up as he walked out of the detention center and took him to the INS detention facility in San Pedro, where he is being held pending prosecution for illegal reentry.

Earlier this week, Councilman Joel Wachs asked Police Chief Bernard C. Parks if his investigators had learned of the INS involvement during their probe of the Rampart scandal.

The chief said they had not, prompting Wachs--who has been calling for an outside, independent investigation of the problems--to later comment that “if this didn’t get detected in the course of the investigation, then there has to be a lot more out there.”

“I’m convinced now--more than ever--that the department really needs help in taking a look at the problems,” Wachs said after the meeting.

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Times staff writer Tina Daunt contributed to this story.