Compassionate Ruling

The importance of a federal court ruling last month on refugees from El Salvador is all the more important and appropriate in the light of the confusion surrounding the closing of applications for amnesty under the new immigration law.

U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon has made permanent an injunction requiring the Immigration and Naturalization Service to inform Salvadorans of their rights when they come into custody. In extensive court sessions over a two-year period he had determined that the INS had been ignoring a six-year-old preliminary injunction.

There has been, Kenyon found, a “pattern and practice of pressuring Salvadorans to accept voluntary departure” from the United States. There was also evidence that their basic rights had been denied through “confiscating legal-rights material and other written material.” He said that the INS routinely argued that the Salvadorans had fled to the United States solely for economic reasons conclusions that “reflect a lack of sensitivity and understanding and derive from ignorance.”

Kenyon ordered the INS once again to inform the Salvadorans of their right to apply for political asylum, their right to counsel and their right to access to a public telephone. It is an appropriate instruction. Such intervention by a judge should not be necessary. The providing of information concerning these basic rights should be standard operating procedure for processing all undocumented aliens.

But Salvadorans have posed a special embarrassment to the Reagan Administration, which has sought to portray their nation as democratic and to contrast the situation of its non-Marxist government with that of nearby Nicaragua. In fact, there is but a democratic veneer in El Salvador, and violence prevails both from leftist guerrillas and from rightist death squads. The denial of human rights and terror are pervasive--good reason for the presence of an estimated 750,000 Salvadorans in the United States, perhaps half of them in the Los Angeles area.

The better solution rests in legislation to grant extended-voluntary-departure status to the Salvadorans, allowing them to live and work in the United States until it is safe for them to return home. Until that legislation is enacted, Kenyon has at least assured the Salvadorans of fair treatment and protection against premature deportation.