Noncitizens Must Report if They Move

The Justice Department said Monday that it would require all noncitizens to report changes of address within 10 days of moving or risk financial penalties, jail and even deportation.

The plan, which relies on a long-neglected 50-year-old law, would apply to 10 million people older than 14 who are living in the United States legally but not as American citizens. More than 1 million are estimated to live in Los Angeles County alone. The new policy also covers illegal immigrants--said to number 8 million to 9 million nationally--but few are expected to step forward.

The announcement was part of a continuing effort by the federal government to overhaul the lax and disorganized system of tracking foreign visitors and residents that had long been in effect before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

If the plan addressed a widespread concern, it also stirred anxieties among immigrants that noncitizens are being targeted for tough law enforcement measures unrelated to terrorism.

Moreover, the announcement came just days after the Justice Department disclosed a precedent-setting agreement with Florida for local police to play a greater role in enforcing immigration laws to protect national security.

“To put somebody in deportation proceedings for failing to report a change of address is like using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly,” said Denyse Sabagh, an immigration lawyer in Washington. “It’s definitely punitive.”

In a statement, Justice Department officials described the plan as “an important step to enhance border security” and an attempt to address the problem of noncitizens avoiding removal from this country by leaving INS officials in the dark about their whereabouts.

The INS will update nearly three dozen forms used by immigrants to notify them of the requirements, officials said.

Others wondered whether the beleaguered Immigration and Naturalization Service was prepared to take on such a demanding and sensitive responsibility. The INS is often criticized for losing paperwork or sending notices to the wrong address--miscues that can greatly complicate legal proceedings involving immigrants.

The plan merely gives the INS “more things to lose,” said Pedro Casillas of Mission Hills, who emigrated from Mexico on a work visa. He said some immigrants so distrust the INS that they would risk deportation rather than register.

“It’s breathtaking,” said Judy Golub, director of advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. “In the guise of making us safer, they’re not fixing the problem.... All this system does is make it easier for people to be charged with violating the law, and the consequences of violating the law are very clear.”

Tessa Gonzalez, 23, who came to Southern California from Indonesia as a student in 1996, wondered: “Am I going to have to register every time I change my dorm room?”

The policy comes as the INS and U.S. colleges race to complete a computerized system to monitor foreign students by next year.

In the statement Monday, Justice Department officials sought to emphasize that the change-of-address rule had been on the books for half a century and that violating it is a criminal offense.

“Unfortunately, far too many fail to comply with this existing requirement,” the Justice Department said, adding that the lack of information “impairs the INS’ ability” to conduct deportation proceedings in many cases, and may also interfere with the agency’s success in informing immigrants of benefits they qualify for.

The policy will apply to noncitizens 15 and older--about 10 million people, including legal noncitizens and refugees, census data show. A survey by the Urban Institute and UCLA found that about 1.1 million adult noncitizens lived in Los Angeles County legally in 2000, suggesting that more than 1 person in 10 affected by the policy may be a Los Angeles resident, said Michael Fix, the institute’s director of immigration studies.

Experts were surprised at the scope of the Justice Department’s announcement, wondering how it would be implemented in the field, where INS officers have often used broad discretion in carrying out orders from Washington. “Who do you pick and how hard do you hit them are abiding questions and tough questions,” Fix said.

Some viewed the plan as a legitimate effort by the government to begin to get a handle on the nation’s fast-changing and highly mobile immigrant population.

“The government of the United States should know where aliens are residing in the United States, who they are and how many of them there are,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a restrictionist group in Washington. “And the fact is we don’t.”

At the same time, Krikorian said the new requirement is politically easier for the Bush administration to impose than a sharp escalation in sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers.

The plan follows a stinging legal defeat for the INS last year. In that case, the Board of Immigration Appeals court found that the INS had failed to properly notify a Salvadoran immigrant about its plans to deport her, even though she had failed to provide the INS with up-to-date address information. The new requirements are designed to strengthen the government’s legal standing to deport people who are not in legal status, and they are not an effort to intimidate lawful immigrants, one official said.

“Bottom line--with this rule, the responsibility is with the noncitizen to ensure that we have the proper address for them, and not the other way around,” a Justice Department official said.

The announcement closely follows another tradition-breaking enforcement plan by the Justice Department, which on Friday disclosed that it had reached an accord with Florida for “a small and select group” of local police to enforce immigration laws in concert with the INS in cases involving terrorism and national security.

Although local Florida police would not engage in routine immigration enforcement, according to official descriptions of the agreement, some have questioned whether such a role for local cops could undermine their relationship with immigrants. Congress in 1996 said the Justice Department could establish such arrangements with individual states, but the strategy sparked criticism even among some major urban police departments, including in Los Angeles.

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Noncitizen Residents

The six states with the largest populations of noncitizen residents as of 2000:

California -- 5.6 million

New York -- 2.2 million

Texas -- 1.7 million

Florida -- 1.6 million

Illinois -- 0.7 million

New Jersey -- 0.7 million

U.S. total -- 17.8 million

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Source: Census Bureau

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Times staff writers Anthony McCartney in Los Angeles and Ronald Brownstein in Miami contributed to this report.