Garment District Rally Protests INS Raids on Immigrants

Federal agents came at dawn to Cristina Mendoza’s South Los Angeles home. While her baby son slept, she said, more than a dozen Immigration and Naturalization Service officers searched the house and arrested her husband, Roberto Mendoza.

He was expelled to his native El Salvador last week as an illegal immigrant, leaving his wife--a naturalized U.S. citizen--and the couple’s year-old son, Jonathan, a citizen by birth.

“We were working hard, paying taxes, looking for the American dream,” a sobbing Cristina Mendoza said Wednesday. “What is the point of breaking up families like mine?”

Mendoza, a 30-year-old office worker, originally from El Salvador, was among the speakers at a Los Angeles rally Wednesday, part of what immigrant advocates called a National Day of Action Against Immigration Raids.

Similar rallies were held in Washington, New York, Miami and other cities.

The aim was to draw attention to growing numbers of INS deportations--and the havoc being created among immigrant families.

Critics of the policy released a new study, titled “Portrait of Injustice,” that harshly criticized mounting INS actions and called for an end to such enforcement.

The report, compiled by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, asserts that INS raids needlessly divide families and often result in constitutional rights violations--especially among Latinos, who advocates say are disproportionately targeted.

The report, for example, cites a 1996 arrest in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in which immigrant Latino workers had numbers stenciled on their arms with ink and were hauled off in patrol cars and a horse trailer soiled with manure.

“To be raiding our families, to be breaking in and certainly breaking up those families . . . is not in any way related to the values we accept,” said Father Allan McCoy, a Roman Catholic parish priest.

The protests come as the INS, armed with additional funding and more stringent laws, is stepping up enforcement nationwide--at job sites, day worker hiring spots, even private homes.

Although attention has been paid to the enforcement buildup along the U.S.-Mexico border, there has been a far less publicized campaign away from the border.

Nationwide, the INS expelled almost 80,000 illegal immigrants during the first six months of the 1998 fiscal year, a 78% increase over the same period last year.

And last year, the agency deported 113,000 people, a record almost certain to be broken, officials say. Those deportations are separate from the many arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border, where most detainees are quickly returned to Mexico.

Deportees are picked up several ways. Some are detained during INS searches at job sites. Others are arrested at their homes after being issued deportation orders. Still others are picked up at local jails or prisons, now regularly canvassed by INS agents.

INS officials say that deportation is the linchpin of the nation’s immigration laws, especially in a country with more than 5 million illegal immigrants--nearly half in California. They deny conducting wholesale sweeps through immigrant neighborhoods or targeting specific groups, such as Latinos.

The INS “is committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in ways that uphold the civil rights of all people,” Commissioner Doris Meissner said in a statement.

In May, after complaints about INS enforcement at work sites, the agency set new guidelines to ensure that officers “observe high standards of professionalism,” Meissner noted.

“INS does not tolerate actions by our employees that violate human or civil rights,” Meissner said.

Critics say that the raids not only break up families--sometimes forcing those left behind onto the welfare rolls--but tend to drive illegal immigrant workers further underground, exposing them to exploitation.

The Los Angeles protest was staged in the heart of the city’s garment district, the nation’s most dense concentration of low-wage, mostly immigrant apparel workers.

“People are afraid to complain about substandard conditions or below-minimum-wage pay because they may get turned over to the INS,” said Luke Williams, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Cristina Mendoza said her family was torn asunder when the INS came looking for someone else. The person sought by agents did not live there anymore, Mendoza said, so they questioned her husband about his papers.

According to Mendoza, her husband was applying for legal status under a 1997 law that holds out the possibility of permanent residence status for some Central Americans.

“Not only is my husband gone,” she said, “but there is one less person to support my child.”