INS Swamped by Green-Card Renewal Bids

A surge in green-card renewals has swamped Orange County’s immigration office and forced many legal residents to wait in lines that stretch around the parking lot and through the night.

Immigrants driven by fear of losing their right to live and work in the United States have been arriving at sunset to wait for the Westminster office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to open at 7 a.m.

Hugging blankets against the cold and clutching thermos bottles of coffee, they spend as many as 14 hours on their feet--with no guarantee of receiving anything in return. Many reach the end of the line only to learn their applications cannot be processed that day and they must return.

“This is horrible,” said Rita Lacerda, a native of Brazil who stood under torrential rains one night and blustery cold the following night, only to be turned away both times. “I’ve lost two days of work because of this.”

INS officials say they are doing their best to cope with a surprising jump in green-card renewal applications.

Many of those renewals are sought by people who gained legal residence in the summer of 1990 under a sweeping federal amnesty program that began in 1986 and legalized 3 million undocumented residents--more than half of them in California.

This year, an estimated 200,000 green cards, which are good for 10 years, will expire in the Southland--about 36,000 in Orange County, INS officials say.

Only two offices in Southern California--in East Los Angeles and Westminster--handle renewals.

Since the amnesty renewals began, officials at the Los Angeles district office say, it’s not unusual for as many as 50 people to be in a line at 5 a.m. on weekday mornings, a full three hours before the offices open. Despite the best efforts of the immigration agency to discourage such practices, people still show up to form a line as early as 3 a.m., Los Angeles INS spokeswoman Sharon Gavin said.

But the lines have been far longer at the Westminster office, largely because the facility has just one window for a clerk, said John Brechtel, the officer in charge. That limits the number of cases it can take each day to 70 or 80, he said--which means few are helped on their first visit.

In addition, Brechtel said, hundreds of immigrants showed up months in advance of their renewal dates, before his office was ready for the onslaught of applications.

Immigrants are allowed to apply for legal residency renewals six months before they expire. Immigrants in line recently said INS officers and mailed notices have encouraged them to apply that early.

But Brechtel and INS officials in Washington say such advance applications are unnecessary. Immigrants, Brechtel said, should apply no more than two or three months before their cards expire.

“The word is out that people need to renew their cards, and everyone is coming at the same time,” he said. “It’s overwhelmed our existing staff.”

The number of waiting people in Orange County has welled in the last six weeks, Brechtel said. And the problem will continue, he said, until the INS moves its office to Santa Ana this summer. That office will have five windows, moving lines faster.

In the meantime, two officers from other offices will be transferred to Westminster to help with the increasing workload, and the agency is scheduling appointments on Saturdays to prevent some immigrants from having to stand in line a second day.

For now, however, 300 to 500 immigrants arrive before sunset, joining a line that wraps around the corner of the agency’s building at Magnolia Street and Hazard Avenue.

As the line grows, snaking back and forth across a parking lot, immigrants in line take turns ferrying coffee and snacks from a nearby convenience store. The only bathrooms within walking distance are in businesses that are closed for the night.

Immigrants who recently withstood downpours and low temperatures to ensure that their cases do not go awry said the long waits are not only frustrating but disruptive. Many must miss work or scramble for child care for several days before they can be seen.

On a recent night, Guillermina Perez of Santa Ana wrapped herself in a comforter and waited in vain for four hours. The mother of three had left her children with a neighbor overnight and was not certain if a baby-sitter would be available the next night.

Faustino Rojas took a vacation day from his shipping job to stand in line with his wife, Guadalupe. The Norwalk couple arrived at 6 p.m. with their lawn chairs and snacks and were stunned to see a line was already forming.

“We’ve just been chatting and trying to keep warm,” Faustino Rojas said. “We cannot afford to be turned away because I don’t have any other days I can take off. We decided to spend the night here to make sure they see us.”

Immigrant advocates blame the federal agency.

“This problem was created by the INS,” Santa Ana attorney Jess Araujo said. “If their job was registering U.S. citizens for jury duty, they wouldn’t have a backlog. But they are dealing with people who are less likely to complain, less likely to feel they have rights and less likely to know what those rights are.”

He is skeptical of INS explanations that officials were surprised by the surge in green-card renewal applications, contending that they should have foreseen the coming jump caused by the amnesty program, and that they have taken few steps to meet the demand.

“The problem is they don’t give it the priority that they should,” he said. “It’s hard for them to put themselves in the position of the applicants.”

Other government agencies that serve hundreds of taxpayers a day, such as the state Department of Motor Vehicles, use a variety of tactics to spare customers long waits.

The DMV conducts some of its business through the mail, schedules appointments and provides staff to handle walk-in customers as well, department spokesman Evan Nossoff said.

Russ Bergeron, an INS spokesman in Washington, D.C., recommends that immigrants use the agency’s Web site to download applications: https://www.ins.usdoj.gov.

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Times staff writer George Ramos contributed to this story.