INS pledges faster processing of cases

By Mary Beth Sheridan The Washington Post
January 17, 2002

It's been 16 years since Juana Fuentes left her 6-year-old in war-scarred El Salvador, fled to the District and filed for political asylum. With her case crawling through the bureaucracy, Fuentes has never been able to return home or see her little girl, who has since grown up and married.

Until recently, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials were estimating that it could take as many as 20 more years to process thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans like Fuentes, who fled their homelands in the 1980s and have lived for years in legal limbo.

But INS officials said this week that the agency had decided to commit additional resources for overtime and perhaps extra staff to handle more cases of the long-waiting Central Americans, who have applied for permanent residency through a special 1997 law, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, or NACARA.

"We're developing a plan," spokesman Dan Kane said. "INS will eliminate the backlog within the next few years."

The cases involve tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who fled their war-ravaged homelands and entered the United States on or before 1990, often illegally. Many applied for political asylum and were granted a series of temporary work permits.

The strife ended by the mid-1990s, but by then, many of the immigrants had roots in the United States and didn't want to go home. The 1997 law was intended to ease the process of gaining residency.

About 33,000 of the immigrants' cases have been processed. But more than 73,000 are pending, and tens of thousands more Salvadorans and Guatemalans may apply, INS officials say. Because the INS is required to act faster on some other categories of asylum cases, such as those of newly arrived foreigners, NACARA applications have moved glacially. Only 6,000 were completed last year.

"People are waiting and waiting. They keep calling," said Silvia Alber, an immigration lawyer at Spanish Catholic Center, a nonprofit agency in Mount Pleasant. Several thousand Salvadorans and Guatemalans in this area are trying to obtain permanent residency, the first step toward citizenship, under the NACARA program.

Among them is Fuentes, 46, who fled El Salvador's war-torn northeastern region of Morazan in 1985, leaving her tiny grocery store and her little girl. Fuentes hasn't seen her daughter since then because of the difficulty that asylum applicants face in leaving and reentering the United States before their cases are resolved.

"When I came, it was so hard. I really missed my daughter. I used to say, 'God, make me into a bird, so I can go to the bed of my daughter,' " said Fuentes, flapping her hands like wings.

Because she had temporary permits, Fuentes could always work legally. She has been employed for years at the cafeteria of the International Monetary Fund and is paid $9.32 an hour. But she couldn't travel freely outside the country, gain access to many government benefits or sponsor relatives to immigrate. She dreamed of buying a house but didn't feel that she had the stability to do so.