Caught Between Dueling Policies

When Bijan Pirazdeh, a native of Iran, went to INS headquarters in downtown Los Angeles at 5 a.m. Monday, he expected to fill out some routine paperwork under the government’s new immigration registration program and go to work a few blocks away.

After all, Pirazdeh, 43, was a Caltrans engineer who had worked for the state more than two years. A resident of California since 1995, he had fled Iran in the mid-1980s after being jailed for three years on political offenses and was granted political asylum in Norway before coming to the United States. He had an interview scheduled for Feb. 7 to obtain permanent resident status.

Instead of heading to the office, Pirazdeh was sent to jail. He remained in custody Friday, threatened with deportation.

“I feel sorrow for this society,” Pirazdeh said in an interview from an INS detention facility in San Pedro. “I still believe this society and this country is based on freedom.”

Like many of the hundreds of immigrants who were detained in Southern California on Monday by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Pirazdeh was caught between two conflicting government policies.

Under an immigration law adopted in the 1990s and reauthorized in 2000, immigrants who have overstayed their visas can have their status regularized by paying a fine and going through a hearing so long as they have family ties in the United States, a job or job offer and a clean record. In Pirazdeh’s case, he has a job and a family relationship because his mother is a permanent resident who is soon to become a citizen.

Many immigrants who had green card applications pending as part of that process -- known as 245i after the relevant section of the immigration law -- had assumed that they were protected under the law while they waited for the INS to finish processing their paperwork even though their visas had expired.

But under the policies adopted to govern the registration process -- at least in the Los Angeles region -- INS officials detained anyone who had an immigration irregularity. Once detained, many of the immigrants, even if released on bail, faced the possibility of deportation.

Stories like Pirazdeh’s have fueled a barrage of criticism all week of the way the INS handled a new requirement that men and boys from many predominantly Muslim nations register with the agency. Men in the United States on temporary visa status who come from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Libya were required to register by Monday.

Immigration advocates say the Justice Department and the INS wrongly placed hundreds of foreign nationals in an impossible situation.

“This should never have happened,” said Greg Simons of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. “A lot of these people who went to register were just waiting for the INS to finishing processing their applications. And so their being out of status was just a matter of the INS not being able to finish its task.”

Such delays, he and others said, led to scene after scene of families desperately awaiting word on husbands, fathers or brothers who had gone in to obey the law and now found themselves treated like criminals.

“I saw one pregnant woman who must have been within a week of having a baby,” said immigration advocate Farah Ramchandani, an Iranian American whose brother was among the 53 U.S. hostages taken by radicals at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran two decades ago.

“The woman had been waiting for days to have her husband released. But they were holding him without bond” for a visa violation.

Officials with the Justice Department and the INS have defended the registration program, insisting that the vast majority of individuals who showed up to register were in the country lawfully and not detained.

Those who were arrested, officials added, were kept in custody only because hundreds of people arrived at the registration process on the last day. The crush of people overwhelmed the ability of authorities to conduct thorough security checks on all those whose visas or other immigration papers had expired, INS officials say.

A city-by-city summary of the new registration process seemed to verify that the problems in the Los Angeles area, home to the nation’s largest Iranian immigrant population, were by far the worst in the country.

The summary, compiled by the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., shows that while INS officials in Baltimore, Boston, San Diego and New York referred out-of-status cases to investigators, the Los Angeles office decided to arrest those individuals until they had been thoroughly cleared through security checks.

Although the INS said all but two dozen of those detained in Los Angeles had been released by Friday, agency officials declined to comment about the other cities.

In Buena Park, about 450 people -- many of them Muslim immigrants from the Middle East -- gathered at the Sequoia Conference Center Friday to rail against the detainments.

“We have rights, and we will not go away simply because we are not citizens,” Tareef Nashashibi, president of the Arab-American Republican Club of Orange County. “We are outraged at what is going on. When you wake up in the morning to say your prayers, call your congressman.”

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on America-Islamic Relations of Southern California, echoed that message.

“This new McCarthyism against Muslims must end,” he said. “Are you going to deport us all?”

Other groups participating included the American Civil Liberties Union, League of United Latin American Citizens, Los Angeles County Bar Assn., National Lawyers Guild and the Japanese American Citizens League.

Jorge Swank, a community relations officer for the INS, evoked hoots when he said: “We feel your pain. We are very sensitive to the issues being raised, but the rules need to be followed. Your message is being very carefully considered at the highest levels.”

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), a key sponsor of immigration reforms, criticized the registration program Friday as “an outrageous and self-defeating policy.”

“The real outrage is that we are asking people to come forward voluntarily and using the program to ensnare them,” Berman said.

The possibility that the INS would be unable to handle a flood of people showing up to comply with the new registration program had been discussed by immigration lawyers and advocates for weeks.

Some immigration officials blamed the problems on a last-minute flood of registrants, but others warned that what happened was an omen of things to come under new Justice Department regulations that will require more immigrants to register in coming months.

“It’s an atrocity,” immigration attorney Steve Espinoza said Friday.

“Before, you could immigrate to the United States and you didn’t have to worry about being detained,” he said. “Now, you can bank on being detained, on paying a bond, and on your case being delayed. What used to take maybe eight months will now probably take two or three years just because of the backlog in immigration.”

On Friday, an INS official said individuals with complaints about their treatment should call (800) 869-4499 to report the cases to the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office.

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Times staff writer David Haldane contributed to this report.