by Vikki Kratz
december 8, 1999
Every so often, the U.S. government tries to live up to America’s reputation
as a safe haven for immigrants. Like when it decided to issue temporary work
permits for Hondurans whose homeland was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in
1998. As a humanitarian gesture, legal and illegal immigrants would be
permitted to stay in the United States and work, without fear of
deportation, for 18 months.
But then the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) stepped in.
In a class-action lawsuit filed last November, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, and other immigration
advocates sued the INS for violating federal law by failing to issue
temporary work permits to Honduran immigrants.
Eleven months after the program started, the groups claim, thousands of
immigrants are in a state of limbo, still waiting for documents that will
permit them to stay and work legally in the United States. The Vermont
Service Center, the regional INS office that handles applications from 13
eastern states and Puerto Rico, backlogged more than 20,000 cases by asking
Hondurans to provide documentation that was not legally required.
“It was a misunderstanding,” said Bill Strassberger, an INS spokesman. “At
one point they were asking for additional documents to establish that the
person had been present in the U.S. [before December 30, 1998]. It was a
matter of misinterpretation by the service center for how the law should be
applied.”
Strassberger said the INS discovered the problem last summer and has already
addressed it. “The lawsuit came after the fact,” he said.
But the ACLU says it still hasn’t seen a resolution of the problem. “We’ve
received information that there are still problems and so we’re continuing
the litigation,” said Christopher Meade, an attorney with the ACLU’s
Immigrants’ Rights Project in New York. “There has been a clear violation of
the law.” Meade said the ACLU filed for class certification of its lawsuit
last week. The INS now has 60 days to respond.
Strassberger refused to comment directly on pending litigation against the
agency. Instead, he pointed out how quickly the INS has processed the more
than 100,000 applications it received from Honduran immigrants. Nearly
70,000 work permits have already been issued, he said, up from 21,000 last
August.
The immigrants will only be allowed to work in the United States until July
5, 2000. However, the U.S. government could decide to extend that date, if
conditions in Honduras have not improved.
Immigration advocates complain that the Vermont Service Center seems to have
more than its fair share of bureaucratic problems -— including misplacing
thousands of naturalization applications when it tried to update its
computer system earlier this year.
But the INS defends the overall quality of work at the service center.
“They’ve got so much paper, so many forms coming in, that if you look at
just a splice of their work, it could give you the impression they have
problems,” Strassberger said. “But if you look at their whole workload, you
would realize that’s unfair. It’s more the exception than the rule.”
Tell that to the thousands of immigrants now scrambling to compile the
additional information the INS erroneously asked for. The INS has decided
not to issue their work permits until the unnecessary documentation is
gathered. “We can’t go back and say, ‘well, never mind,’” Strassberger said.
“That would just confuse people more.”
Vikki Kratz is a freelance writer and the former research editor for Mother
Jones magazine.
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