Jewish Group Urges Involvement in Plight of Salvadoran Refugees

For Salvadorans and other refugees from Central America, the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas is the last stop on a long road north.

Fleeing civil wars and political repression, they flood the border towns between Brownsville and Rio Grande City with hopes of winning political asylum.

Instead, they become victims of U.S. immigration policies that church workers, community activists and the refugees themselves charge are arbitrary and discriminatory.

As long as the Reagan administration continues to support the political regimes of the refugees’ home countries, advocates charge, they must live in a legal limbo in one of the poorest counties in the United States.

Now leaders of Judaism’s Conservative movement are calling for increased Jewish involvement in the plight of refugees, finding in their experience echoes of the Exodus and Ellis Island.

Four rabbis and four lay leaders took part in a recent fact-finding tour of the region, visiting refugees, touring a federal detention facility and meeting with both refugees’ advocates and officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The picture that emerged was shocking, according to Rabbi Andrew Warmflash of North Brunswick, N.J.

Warmflash participated in the late-April tour as a member of the Social Justice Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, which co-sponsored the trip with the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism.

ARBITRARY SYSTEM OF JUSTICE

In a report to the assembly that he prepared along with Rabbi Charles Feinberg of Madison, Wis, Warmflash charges that refugees face an arbitrary system of justice, are unaware of their rights under U.S. law and are routinely separated from family members while they await the disposition of their cases.

“We didn’t find any sympathy to the human dimension,” Warmflash said, in a telephone interview, of his meeting with federal officials. “These people are being ignored and neglected.”

Warmflash said the INS is not living up to the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980, which said humanitarian protection should be offered to those who have a reasonable fear that they will be persecuted if they return home. The act was meant to free asylum decisions from ideological or political considerations.

But despite the stories told by refugees of political harassment and assassination, the Reagan administration has insisted that those fleeing El Salvador, a country whose government it supports, were trying to escape poverty, not persecution. It has granted asylum to fewer than 5 percent of the Salvadoran refugees.

By contrast, over 80 percent of all Nicaraguans who applied for asylum in 1987 received it.

“The INS still carries out the old priorities,” said Jonathan Moore, a paralegal and refugee rights advocate in Harlingen, Tex., who met with the assembly delegation in April.

According to Moore, who works for the Proyecto Libertad legal services project, immigration officials base their decisions to grant asylum on State Department guidelines characterizing Nicaragua as a totalitarian state and El Salvador as a democracy.

SUPPORT FOR SALVADORAN REGIME

The Reagan administration has backed the army and government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte with more than $3 billion in American aid. Those opposed to that support say the Salvadoran government has been ruthless in its attempts to suppress leftist opposition. The country has been engulfed in civil war since 1979.

But those seeking refuge from the war won a victory in early May, said Moore, when a federal district court judge in California ruled in favor of a 1982 claim by Salvadorans that they were being discriminated against by the INS.

Judge David Kenyon based his ruling on evidence of political and human rights abuses in El Salvador, charging in turn that the INS discouraged Salvadorans from seeking political asylum.

Moore said it remains to be seen what the impact of the ruling will be. In the meantime, he said, the government still plans to build larger detention facilities for refugees awaiting hearings, even as they confine many of them to the narrow border area of southern Texas.

David Ayala, district counsel for the Harlingen District of the INS, said that the California ruling will have no effect on the operation of the INS in the valley, and denied that refugees from El Salvador are treated differently than those from Nicaragua.

“We have been in compliance since the early ’80s” with federal guidelines toward refugees, he said in a telephone interview. “We certainly don’t have any mandates or information that we should treat anybody differently.”

Informed of the findings of the Conservative delegation, with whom he met in April, Ayala responded, “That’s disturbing. I never indicated or mentioned at all that the determinations by judicial bodies are arbitrary. That is definitely not the case, and there is the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington, should the person not be satisfied.”

VOLUNTARY DEPARTURE PLAN

Nevertheless, Warmflash is now urging support of federal legislation that would offer extended voluntary departure status to Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans. The legislation would temporarily halt deportation of refugees until the situation in their country stabilizes.

Warmflash also would like to see Jewish organizations raising money or volunteering to provide affordable legal services in the region. In contrast to the sanctuary movement, extending such help to Central American refugees would not entail breaking the law, but seeing it administered fairly, he said.

Warmflash acknowledged that few Jews are affected directly by government policy toward Central American refugees. But he insisted that both the Bible and history argue that Jews have a responsibility toward strangers in their midst.

Noting that the rabbinic sage Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Warmflash said, “But the other half of that is ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?’

“The Jewish community has tended to focus only on the first half,” he said. “We cannot only seek to work on parochial Jewish concerns. We must look beyond ourselves.”