INS Move of Asylum Cases Hit : Immigration: The agency will transfer their handling 55 miles from Los Angeles, which has the nation’s largest number of applicants.

In a move that could hamper thousands of immigrants seeking political asylum, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has decided to move the handling of such cases to a temporary office in southern Orange County--55 miles from Los Angeles, which has the nation’s largest concentration of asylum applicants.

Madeline Janis, executive director of the Central American Refugee Center, said the move will force thousands of applicants to reckon with a 1 1/2-hour drive from Los Angeles, or a bus ride that could take 4 1/2 hours one way.

“Los Angeles has the largest number of asylum applications in the country and there’s no asylum office” in the city, she said. “Only the INS would do something like this.”

Janis said the move has serious implications for the estimated 40,000 affected people in the Los Angeles area, who could be barred from applying for asylum again for five years. She said they could face deportation proceedings if they fail to show up for their asylum hearings.

“It’s just absurd,” Janis said.

But Rosemary Melville, the INS official in charge of the asylum office, said the federal agency will allow applicants to reschedule their hearings in the interim and not put them in deportation proceedings if they fail to appear.

“We’re going to accommodate people to a much greater degree,” she said.

Melville conceded that the location of the asylum office in south Orange County is distant and inconvenient. She said the agency had been planning on a site in Buena Park--still 20 miles away from downtown Los Angeles--but negotiations fell through 10 days ago, forcing the INS to make a last-minute switch to the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel.

“It’s traumatized all of us,” Melville said. “It’s not good for us, or our employees, either. It’s just an awful situation.”

She said the agency hopes to move the office to a permanent location, closer to Los Angeles, within 90 days. But she warned that the search for a new site could take as long as six months.

Up until last week, asylum applications were handled through the Los Angeles district office in the Federal Building downtown. But as part of a program to make the process more fair and efficient, it was decided that the operation should be moved to its own office staffed by a special unit of 28 officers trained in international law and asylum issues.

The original plan called for the office in Buena Park, a location that was also criticized by immigrant rights groups as being too far from Los Angeles, where the vast majority of asylum applications in the Western Region are filed.

Vibiana Andrade, regional counsel for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said immigrant rights groups lobbied to have the program placed in an existing INS facility near MacArthur Park, west of downtown. The park is in the heart of the city’s Salvadoran community, whose members constitute a significant proportion of asylum applicants.

But Melville said one disadvantage to the MacArthur Park area, which has a history of violence associated with gangs and drug abuse, was that it was not attractive to INS employees.

“We didn’t want to go through training people . . . and then they show up and say, ‘God, I can’t stand the neighborhood’ and leave,” the INS official said.

“No matter where we put the office, people will say it’s too far to go,” she said. “A location was not selected solely on the highest number of applicants. That’s not the only factor.”