INS Detention Center Is a ‘Grand Hotel’ of Disillusionment, Fear

Sitting in the dreary immigration detention center courtyard, straining to understand a young Filipino as he told the story of his journey to the United States, Isaac Galarza Jaramillo broke into laughter.

The toughened young Contra from Nicaragua was not laughing at the storytelling in a language he did not understand. He was laughing at the surreal predicament he shared with the storyteller--a shabby, converted Inglewood motel, overcrowded with men and women who speak different languages, each with a harrowing tale of torture and murder back home, of nations torn apart by civil strife, of the toll on the human soul.

Their flight to the United States brought them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in Inglewood, which serves as the agency’s primary center for illegal aliens apprehended in Los Angeles County. Most are seeking political asylum. Many have been kept at this way station for months, trapped in a maze of immigration laws they do not understand.

Evoked Garcia Marquez

It all reminded Galarza of a book of short stories he once read by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a master of literary magic realism. Like Garcia Marquez’s stories, the stories told at the detention center are also about dreams, betrayal, fantastic journeys and absurd turn of events.

“That’s what made me laugh,” explained Galarza, 20, who said he joined the Contras when he was 14, a few days after his parents were killed in a car explosion. “Each of us is here with a different story, a different defeat or disillusionment, each of us with a different dream. In this little piece of the United States, they’ve managed to gather the whole world.”

On any given day, more than a dozen nations are represented at the Century Boulevard facility, which is used to hold growing numbers of aliens caught on arrival at Los Angeles International Airport.

As many as 115 aliens a day sleep four-to-a-room in the often crowded former motel, reflecting a nationwide shortage of immigration holding facilities.

In an effort to address the detention housing shortage, the INS is scrambling to find larger facilities and is expanding others, including the agency’s former regional headquarters on Terminal Island. That facility, scheduled for completion in about a year, will hold 450 aliens.

Wants to Move

The INS’ contract with a private firm that runs the Inglewood facility expires at the end of September, and the agency plans to move to a larger facility--if it can find one.

Meanwhile, the former motel--the place still has a eye-catching sign out front that identifies it as the Mardi Gras, a leftover from its previous life--remains a weather vane of ill winds around the world.

The center’s current population includes a Cuban veterinarian who said he was not allowed to practice his profession in his native country, and several Sikhs from the northern Indian state of Punjab, who said they will be killed by police if they return to a secessionist war in which thousands have been killed.

There is also a young man from South Africa who stowed away aboard a U.S.-bound freighter because, he said in heavily accented English, “in my country, the government kill black people.”

In the wake of the student uprising in mainland China, the center has housed several young Chinese refugees.

The largest group is made up of Central Americans, who have come to the United States to escape the region’s violence.

One day in early September, seven intense young men from the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka sat on wooden benches in a corner of the courtyard and gave horrific accounts of a society run amok. They showed a reporter their scars--testimony, they said, to repeated torture suffered at the hands of government forces fighting separatist Tamil guerrillas. They spoke only on the promise their names would not be published--like many occupants of the former Mardi Gras Motel, they are worried about reprisals against relatives.

Tamils, traditionally an affluent ethnic minority in Sri Lanka, have become the target of indiscriminate government repression, they said. A young man, one of several university students in the group, said that soldiers had tortured and raped him, and raped a young female cousin “in front of my eyes.” After his release, he went to his aunt’s house. Soldiers broke into the home, he said, and slaughtered his aunt, her two small children and one of his friends. He hid under a bed and fled the country the next night.

Although immigration judges generally have granted political asylum to Tamils, the cases of several of those now at the Inglewood facility have bogged down, and the men do not understand why.

“We don’t understand why we are being treated like this in a democratic country,” one of the Tamils said. He described the United States as “a beautiful democracy . . . where human rights are highly respected and dreams come true.”

Many of the refugees are unable to pay for legal representation. As a result, many of the detainees--like John Samuel Farassi, 19, the South African stowaway who said he has been in detention for 10 months--languish in detention without an advocate to explain what is happening to them.

“I try to call to find out about my situation and they don’t tell me anything,” Farassi said. “They just forget me here.”

Some refugees, like Salvadorans and Guatemalans, are routinely denied asylum. Those who come from countries that have poor relations with the United States sometimes find themselves in a form of international limbo.

Even after U.S. immigration courts order them deported, it is difficult to return them to their home countries because diplomatic channels have been cut off, said Lynn Alvarez, an attorney with the immigrants rights office of Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Unlike large numbers of refugees who enter the country illegally and then apply for political asylum, those apprehended at ports of entry like Los Angeles International Airport are not allowed to file asylum applications immediately or post bond.

Despite the Inglewood facility’s limited space and Spartan accommodations, detainees have few complaints about the center itself. They don’t mind the institutional food, the ragged furniture, peeling paint, or the spiked fence that guards the building’s periphery.

The occupants are free to move in and out of their quarters, but not to leave the grounds.

There is little to help them pass the time. Other than an occasional half-court basketball game in the small courtyard and an afternoon English class, the men and women have little to break the monotony. They can watch television in a language many do not understand or sit listlessly in the center’s small courtyard. They have no views of the new world outside.

Their main complaint is that American immigration authorities treat them like criminals. They are sometimes handcuffed and shackled when taken downtown for hearings. There are complaints of rough treatment by some INS officers.

“These people aren’t criminals,” said Alvarez of Legal Aid. “They’re just regular folks, and there is nothing for them to do in detention. They just sit and stare into space, day after day.”

FO The courtyard of the former Mardi Gras Motel in Inglewood, one of the common areas for refugees at the detention center.