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Ins bags taxpayer { December 20 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez20dec20.storyhttp://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez20dec20.story
POINTS WEST
Hunting Terrorists, INS Bags Taxpayer
Steve Lopez
December 20 2002
The war on terrorism reached Woodland Hills last week. The federales threw a net over a 39-year-old construction worker, a working Joe with a Christmas tree in the living room and two American cars in the driveway.
This country and western fan happens to be a British citizen who was born in Iran and moved to California four years ago. Kourosh Reyhanyfar reported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service last week to reregister, and like dozens if not hundreds of other men, his reward for compliance was a trip to jail.
"If there are any terrorists out there, they are probably laughing at these law-abiding people who went and turned themselves in," says Babak Sotoodeh of the Alliance of Iranian Americans in Santa Ana.
Reyhanyfar's wife, a registered nurse in pediatric intensive care at Northridge Hospital, became hysterical when he called from downtown L.A. to tell her he was in handcuffs.
What happened? she demanded.
The short answer is that homeland security is in the hands of buffoons.
One day, U.S. ally Armenia was on the list of countries whose visiting nationals were required to update their visas. The next day, Armenia was struck without explanation. Egypt still isn't on the list, even though a Sept. 11 ringleader was Egyptian.
You feeling any safer yet?
Reyhanyfar heard about the INS reporting requirement last week on the radio. He told his wife, Sepideh, that after going by the book since arriving from England early in 1999, they shouldn't play loose with immigration law. Besides, what did he have to fear?
Reyhanyfar took off work from a window installation job Thursday, waited his turn at the downtown Los Angeles INS office, and was told to come back Friday morning.
He went back and told his story. He and his wife came here on tourist visas and decided to stay, applying for extensions every six months. In the middle of the third extension, they took advantage of a change in the law and paid $1,000 each to apply for a green card.
Shortly afterward, they got work permits, Social Security numbers and driver's licenses. Sepideh, who had been a nurse in England, went to work at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.
Cut to Friday's INS inquisition.
"They asked why I didn't complete the third visa extension, and I explained the situation," Reyhanyfar says. "I did this, I did that, we got our work permits, and now we are waiting for our green cards."
Thousands are in the same boat, but that doesn't seem to matter to the INS.
After stonewalling for a week, the INS claimed that reports of its ethnic cleansing campaign have been greatly exaggerated. The agency claims it had to lock some people up because it couldn't process the crush that showed up too close to the Dec. 16 registration deadline.
Reyhanyfar beat the deadline by three days, but that wasn't good enough for this Alice-in-Wonderland agency. The Valley carpenter knew he was in trouble when he saw two officers go by with an Iranian in custody, and his inquisitor told them, "I've got another one."
Reyhanyfar says he was cuffed and led down a hall like a common criminal.
"We went from the eighth floor to the basement, past many people, and it was humiliating to be in handcuffs," he said.
Reyhanyfar and roughly 20 others were taken to a holding area. He sat on a bench, hoping he'd be able to make bail, get home by dinnertime, and sort it out later.
No chance.
He says that roughly 15 hours later, around 3 a.m., he was fingerprinted and loaded onto a bus for a ride to an INS detention center in Lancaster. Drivers flashed the lights on and off and blasted the radio, he says, making it impossible to sleep.
In Lancaster, he was ordered to strip naked for a search. They confiscated his belongings and gave him a blue and yellow prison suit, and Reyhanyfar got bunk No. 48 in a 50-bed barracks. Reyhanyfar had injured his neck in a recent car accident and asked for an aspirin or a pillow, but says he got neither.
And these guys fled the ayatollah?
"I just couldn't believe it," says Reyhanyfar, who had no idea when he might be released. The only comfort was that everyone else was just as miserable and confused as he was. A teenager, locked up with his father, was in tears.
"It was a nightmare. I wasn't angry so much as I was shocked and humiliated. I kept phoning my wife and I would get choked up. I didn't expect to be treated like a terrorist."
Reyhanyfar was held three more days. He was released Monday night on $1,500 bail.
"I cried so loud when I drove to Lancaster to get him," Sepideh told me Wednesday evening as she and some 3,000 others demonstrated outside the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. She held a sign: "What happened to liberty and justice for all?"
Now the Reyhanyfars are in limbo as Koroush awaits an unscheduled court hearing. He has no idea whether he'll get a green card. Or be deported.
Mix politics with bureaucratic bungling and epic butt-covering, and this is what you get.
You get real terrorists eluding capture here and abroad while the feds bag Kourosh Reyhanyfar, a taxpayer and family man who hasn't set foot in Iran since he fled 25 years ago.
"Ok, they have a job to do," Reyhanyfar said Wednesday night after putting his 12-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son to bed. "But I think they could be doing it in a different way."
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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes. com.
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Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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