Caught Between 2 Laws: Asylum Bid Leads to Detention

Arcadio Santos, an exiled trade unionist from Honduras, said it was “in good faith” that he went to the downtown Los Angeles offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service recently to apply for political asylum.

His trust in the authorities was shattered, however, when, after a brief interview, he was arrested as an illegal alien.

Santos, 40, said he sought protection after four fellow unionists were assassinated.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect this to happen,” Santos said during an interview in an immigration service holding cell.

“I went there with good intentions. I didn’t know the law worked that way.”

Government officials say they are holding Santos in an Inglewood detention facility because he was deported last year and his return to the United States constituted a felony. Santos’ attorneys counter that he is a victim of a “malicious application” of the country’s immigration laws.

Attorneys at El Rescate, a local refugee support agency, claim that in the last two months, four other Central American refugees have been detained as they submitted asylum applications at the Los Angeles office of the immigration service. Three of them have been deported to the countries from which they allegedly fled from persecution, the attorneys said.

Santos and the others, the attorneys contend, are victims of seemingly conflicting U.S. laws.

Federal law gives the immigration service the authority to detain those immigrants who, like Santos, have entered the country illegally. Under the 1980 Refugee Act, however, people fleeing persecution in their native countries can apply for political asylum in the United States without fear of being detained by the immigration service, even if they entered the country illegally.

‘Guy Was a Felon’

Immigration officials, conceding that cases like Santos’ are highly unusual, say that under the law, people who have been deported cannot reenter the country for five years. “This guy was a felon when he walked into our office,” said George Rayner, immigration service assistant district director for deportation and detention.

Rayner said that although the protections of the Refugee Act are applied to most asylum applicants, some illegal immigrants are beginning to use the law to obtain work authorization they cannot obtain under the tougher 1986 law. Immigration officials in Los Angeles said last April that there had been a tenfold increase in the number of asylum applications over the previous year.

“I don’t think the people who drafted the law had the intention of opening our borders. The law was supposed to provide for an opportunity for people who had fled persecution to be admitted as refugees,” Rayner said. “What we’re seeing now is not what Congress had in mind.”

Immigration policy toward political asylum applicants has been the subject of increasing contention, and several lawsuits have been filed in the last year on behalf of Central American refugees.

In August, Latino asylum applicants filed suit to force immigration officials to issue them work permits. The asylum applicants added new charges to their suit on Monday, alleging that asylum interviews are too brief and conducted only in English.

Order Broadened

A federal judge in San Francisco extended and broadened an order on Wednesday, requiring immigration officials in Northern and Central California to allow aliens to work while seeking asylum in the United States.

“Within the last year, there’s been a nationwide policy and practice imposed to discourage individuals from exercising their right to apply for political asylum,” said Vibiana Andrade of the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights here. “If you arrest people and scare them off and make it illegal for them to work in the country, that’s going to have an effect in the community.”

“He was doing what he could to apply as a refugee, and he was slapped into a detention center,” said Todd Howland, an attorney at El Rescate who is representing Santos. “Why would you have a provision in the Refugee Act to allow people to go the director’s office if you’re going to arrest people when they get there?”

As told by Santos, his detention last month has all the elements of a Kafkaesque drama.

Santos said he was persecuted as the treasurer of a banana plantation workers’ union in northern Honduras.

Four other leaders of the union were killed by armed men dressed in civilian clothes in late 1985, Santos said, and he fled to the United States because of threats on his life.

He was detained by the immigration service while looking for work at the corner of Pico and Sawtelle boulevards in Los Angeles in April and was deported at U.S. government expense in July, Santos said. After less than two months in Honduras, he returned illegally to the United States and settled in the Westlake district.

‘I Didn’t Know’

Encouraged by his wife to settle his immigration status, Santos said, he went to the Los Angeles immigration office to request an asylum application.

Santos said he returned to the downtown office with the completed application on Jan. 24 and waited in the first-floor lobby with other applicants until his number was called. He entered a conference room as an immigration official was going over his application.

“He told me, ‘Didn’t you read these lines down here. Do you want us to put you in jail for two years?’ ” Santos said the official led him to a room in the building’s basement, where he waited until another official came to talk to him.

Santos said the second official asked him how long he had been in detention. “I told him I didn’t know I had been detained. I told him I had come to apply for permission (asylum),” Santos said.

“He told me that I wasn’t going to get permission because I had been arrested before and that it was better if I signed a deportation order.”

Among the other cases named by El Rescate is that of Emilio Trejo, a 26-year-old survivor of a 1980 massacre in El Salvador who was deported from the United States in 1982. He returned to the United States and was detained by the immigration service as he submitted an asylum application at the Los Angeles office in December and later was deported, said Haydee Sanchez of El Rescate.

Hearing to Be Set

Another Salvadoran immigrant, Pedro Morales, was also detained and deported in December, she said.

Santos’ attorneys requested political asylum for their client at a deportation hearing Thursday. The request halts the deportation process, and Santos will have a hearing on his asylum application, probably in March, Howland said.

By late Thursday afternoon, Santos’ wife had collected only $500 for her husband’s $1,500 bail, and volunteers were calling church organizations to raise the rest of the money, Sanchez said.