Mahony, Riordan Call for Equity in Deportation Law

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and Mayor Richard Riordan added their voices Wednesday to those calling on Congress to provide Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants facing deportation with the same protection now being considered for people from Nicaragua.

At a rally in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, Father Dennis P. O’Neill, a spokesman for the cardinal, said the prelate was “distressed by the unevenness and inequality” of the Republican congressional plan, adding: “The aggressors these people fled [in Central America] had different names and wore various uniforms, but the terror which prompted their flight was the same.”

Riordan also is backing “fair and equal treatment” for all Central American immigrants, said Dolores Canizales, an aide who represented the mayor at the rally, attended by about 150 activists.

The event was part of a coordinated nationwide effort as Congress nears a vote on a Central American relief plan that in recent days has become a divisive topic, splitting the Latino and immigrant communities and reviving memories of the brutal civil wars that tore the isthmus apart during the Cold War. Critics of the GOP proposal have called for an alternative response that treats all people facing deportation equally, whether they are from Mexico, Haiti, Central America or elsewhere. Without congressional action, about 500,000 Central American immigrants who have lived in the United States since at least 1990 with temporary legal protection could face deportation under tough immigration laws passed last year. Up to half, mostly Salvadorans and Guatemalans, reside in Southern California, according to community estimates. Most entered the country illegally and later sought political asylum.

The Clinton administration has backed a proposal that would give most Central Americans and others in deportation proceedings an opportunity to fight expulsion before immigration judges under the more lenient rules in place before Congress changed the law. Under the Clinton plan, applicants would need to have resided in the United States at least seven years and demonstrate “extreme hardship” if deported, but would not be obliged to meet today’s “exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship standard and the new, 10-year residence requirement.

But Congress is mulling a much different Republican plan that would grant permanent residence status--in essence, an amnesty--to Nicaraguans who came to the United States by December 1995. Most of the 50,000 or so prospective beneficiaries, concentrated in South Florida, arrived here when the leftist Sandinista regime reigned and was targeted for ouster by successive GOP administrations. The Sandinistas were ultimately voted out of office in 1990.

The Republican plan--dubbed the “Victims of Communism Relief Act”--would deal less generously with the much larger group of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who, unlike the Nicaraguans, fled U.S.-backed governments facing leftist guerrilla insurgencies. Under the congressional plan, Salvadorans and Guatemalans could seek hardship reprieves from deportation under the more lenient rules in effect last year, but they would have no guarantees of success.

U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Florida), a chief architect of the GOP plan, has said that any broader relief effort is not politically practical, though he sympathizes with the plight of Salvadorans and Guatemalans.