INS Halts Crackdown on Late Amnesty

Responding to a court order, federal authorities Wednesday put off implementing a new policy that could cost tens of thousands of immigrants the opportunity to gain legal status in the United States.

Immigration and Naturalization Service officials were notifying all district offices that the policy shift was no longer in effect, said Kathy Craig, a senior immigration examiner at INS headquarters in Washington.

At issue are the fates of many thousands of illegal immigrants--more than one-third of whom live in the Los Angeles area--who maintain in a federal class-action lawsuit that they were wrongly discouraged from applying for the amnesty program of 1987-88 because of short-term absences from the United States. Amnesty-seekers were required to prove continuous residence since 1982, but brief trips abroad were not supposed to render applicants ineligible.

According to Peter A. Schey, a Los Angeles attorney who represents the immigrants, more than 300,000 people may have been improperly discouraged from applying because they were out of the country for brief periods. INS officials, who call most of the claims spurious, say the actual number probably is far lower than 100,000.

The protracted and acrimonious legal battle reached the Supreme Court in 1993. The court vacated some rulings, but sent the issue back to lower courts for reconsideration.

Hundreds of new amnesty-seekers still come forward each week, mostly in Los Angeles and New York, hoping to apply under what is erroneously known as “late amnesty.”

Under terms of various court orders, the INS has accepted tens of thousands of provisional applications from amnesty-seekers who can demonstrate reasonable claims that they were improperly discouraged from applying during 1987-88. Authorities have also been staying deportations and issuing work papers in such cases.

But the INS policy shifted abruptly Jan. 30, when agency headquarters in Washington directed all offices to cease accepting such provisional amnesty applications. The INS also stopped granting employment papers and stays of deportation to affected applicants and moved to seize work documents.

In explaining the agency’s move, INS officials maintained that the 1993 Supreme Court decision vacated all previous court rulings in the case--including those preserving the application rights of late amnesty-seekers.