The INS detention policy is expensive. The service spent approximately $142 million last year on detention of excludable and deportees.

In the Bay Area the INS rents space from the Oakland City Jail for approximately 45 people at a cost per detainee of about $70 a day.

Because parole is discretionary treatment of excludable differs from city to city.

In Los Angeles attorneys say a chronic lack of detention space has prompted INS officials to put bonds on excludable aliens routinely. In Miami INS Assistant District Director Kenneth Powers says he will parole an alien with a strong asylum case.

We just don’t detain indiscriminately Powers said. We have limited resources so we won’t detain the people we don’t have to

Attomey argue there is no check on the INS whims. Unlike in deportation cases an immigration judge has neither control over INS decisions to detain an alien nor authority to lower bond.

Consideration of a bond should be given to the judge like everything else Wu says. It’s a better arena for a test of credibility. Now says Wu inequities are such that people in deportation proceedings who’ve committed aggravated felonies. Can be paroled and they are out. Meanwhile you have a guy who is a freedom fighter and he sits in jail.

In response to complaints the INS has instituted an experimental project in which 200 excludable asylum seekers including 12 in San Francisco have been released from custody and are being monitored to see if they attend immigration court hearings until their cases are finished.

Under the project which grew out of discussions in late 1989 between INS commissioner Gene McNairy and immigrants’ rights group’s asylum applicants also have been released in New York Miami and Los Angeles. The project began in May and is scheduled to run 18 months. Aliens must check in with the INS once a month and must appear at immigration court hearings.

Under the program’s guidelines released aliens were to have access to housing and help getting jobs through a community support network set up by legal service and community agencies. But it appears that only 66 out of the 200 were released by the INS in that manner according to Arthur Helton director of a group organizing the project

For example in New York 54 of the 127 excludable aliens released had aid from a community network Helton says the others were released in a haphazard fashion and that his organization the Refugee Project of the New York based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights was never given information on the remaining 73 aliens Helton says he has no accurate way to know if they’re complying with the program.

In San Francisco the project’s 12 participants were all released with community support But the 52 in Miami and the nine in Los Angeles were not according to Helton. The 66 aliens nationwide who were released with community assistance Helton says have a 95% compliance record with INS reporting requirements.

I think there is an element of hostility and adverse airlines in some of the local INS offices says Helton. One way to subvert the program is to simply dump people out without a reasonable assurance that people will comply and I think that may have happened to some degree.

Veme Jervis an INS spokesman disputes Helton’s claims saying that aliens weren’t released unless the INS knew that housing and jobs were available led to his conclusions but that a change in detention policies. Will address a problem they claim the INS   the human costs of incarceration especially for those who have escaped persecution in their home countries.

These people have not done anything wrong in a criminal sense says James Mayock a partner at Crosland Strand Freeman & Mayock. Many people have genuine asylum claims but because of a policy to be hard line they’re not treated any differently. The INS does not have the manpower or the willpower to sort out people with legitimate claims.

When Singh’s family found out he was in jail his daughter became distraught because she thought no one would marry her says Jobe Singh’s lawyer. She killed herself.

This is something the INS could never have predicted Jobe says. But they are messing with cultural factors they don’t understand and don’t seem to care much about (The Recorder)

Article extracted from this publication >> June 28, 1991