Agency to back off during census count

Robert Macy

Friday, Feb. 18, 2000 | 3:09 a.m.

LAS VEGAS - The Immigration and Naturalization Service plans to curtail highly -visible activities in neighborhoods where federal census workers are counting in a bid to avoid intimidating documented and illegal immigrants.

The INS will be issuing a directive to field offices in the near future regarding guidelines to be followed when the national census begins in March, a spokesman said.

Unless there is an issue of public safety, INS agents will avoid going into areas where census takers are canvassing, Don Mueller, a spokesman for the INS office in Washington, D.C. said Friday.

"If it is the kind of enforcement thing we can put off a week or two we will do so," Mueller said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "Before we would go in, we would make sure this was not an area the census was counting."

Mueller said the directive, still being fine-tuned in Washington, is designed to ease concerns of immigrants who are worried that information they give to the Census Bureau will make its way to the INS.

"There is a firewall between Census and us in sharing information on individuals," Mueller said. "We don't want anybody to make a nexus between the INS and the census count because it doesn't exist."

"We've made it clear that we have every desire to make sure the census is a success, that everyone is counted, including aliens, either documented or illegal" said Russell Ahr, special assistant to the director of the INS office in Phoenix. The office covers Arizona and Nevada.

"We're going to make every effort to inform the community there is no overlap between the INS and the census," Ahr said. "Census workers are not agents of the INS and should not be considered as such."

Ahr said the Census Bureau will coordinate with the INS where they will be operating and at what times of the day.

"We would take that into account when planning an operation," Ahr said.

Mueller said the INS did much the same thing in 1990.

"We would back off of operations that could reasonably be postponed," Mueller said.

"If you see the census taker going through your apartment building and there were people with INS jackets arresting people in another apartment in the building, it would make people think we were working together."

Mueller said INS operations would continue in cases where there was an issue of public safety.

"If we know there's a safe house, and have information someone's holding people against their will, we're going to go in there," Mueller said. "We're not going to risk anyone's safety."

"We will continue to do enforcement, but we will do it in a mindful way of knowing where census officials are working," Ahr said.

Ahr said INS priorities for enforcement are smuggling of immigrants, immigrants who have been convicted of violent crimes and pose a safety factor, employers who knowingly and willingly hire illegal immigrants, and immigrants who commit fraud by selling forged documents.

The vast majority of immigrants tend to end up in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Miami, Ahr said.

Las Vegas, the nation's fastest growing metropolitan area, is one of the cities where there has been a significant increase in immigrants, according to William Bellamy, the Nevada and Southern Arizona regional manager for the Census Bureau.