Double Standard for Refugees?

By Ed Magnuson

The Administration seemed squarely at odds with itself last week over the prickly issue of refugees from Central America. In Florida, Perry Rivkind, the district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that he would not deport citizens from Nicaragua who seek political asylum in the U.S. In Arizona, the Justice Department wound up its prosecution of eleven church workers accused of smuggling aliens from El Salvador and Guatemala into the U.S. -- even though these illegal immigrants also claimed that they feared persecution in their home countries.

The two cases reinforced the widely held impression that a double standard exists in the treatment of aliens seeking sanctuary in the U.S. In fact, the Administration has made it plain that it takes a more sympathetic view of the persecution claims of anyone fleeing a Communist country. The Justice Department is considering a new interpretation of the 1980 Refugee Act that would establish a "presumption" that aliens fleeing a Communist regime have a well-founded fear of persecution that would meet the requirement for political asylum. The ins's Rivkind, who stopped deportation proceedings against eight Nicaraguans in Miami last week, apparently jumped the gun on the policy shift, since Attorney General Edwin Meese has yet to sign off on the new interpretation.

The Administration's changing sanctuary policy may well run afoul of Congress. "I think it is unfair as hell to permit blanket asylum for Nicaraguans and not for Salvadorans," protested Arizona's Democratic Senator , Dennis DeConcini. He has a bill pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee that would give Salvadoran refugees the same status as that being considered for Nicaraguans.

In Tucson, the tumultuous six-month "sanctuary" trial went to the jury last week. Lawyers defending the church workers pleaded with Federal Judge Earl Carroll to let them point out the inconsistency of the Government's asylum policy to the jurors. The judge ruled that this was irrelevant. Earlier, he had banned any testimony about persecution in the refugees' home country or about the religious and humanitarian motives of the defendants in providing sanctuary. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Reno doggedly confined the prosecution's case to charges that the religious groups conspired to smuggle aliens into the U.S. and thus violated immigration laws. "These people are protesting against U.S. law," he said in his closing argument. "They have every right to do that, but they have no right to smuggle aliens into this country."

The defense claimed that the Government had violated the First Amendment rights of the defendants by sending informers into their religious meetings and secretly tape-recording their conversations. The defense also managed to establish that the defendants -- a nun, two priests, a minister and seven lay workers -- were hardly criminal types. Whatever the verdict, the trial apparently has strengthened rather than discouraged the sanctuary movement. Partly because of the publicity surrounding the case, 16 U.S. cities and the state of New Mexico have proclaimed their territories sanctuaries for anyone fleeing political repression or armed conflict in any Central American nation.

With reporting by Michael Riley/Tucson and Alessandra Stanley/Washington