Immigration Service

WASHINGTON - Hundreds of immigrants with no ties to terrorism were jailed under often harsh conditions for weeks or months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and some were likely abused, according to a government investigation released yesterday. The report by the Justice Department's inspector general found "significant problems" in the government's handling of foreigners who were jailed under blanket edicts adopted by the department after the attacks. The internal watchdog's report provides the first official look at the detention of 762 immigrants swept up under the aggressive policies of Bush administration.

WASHINGTON -- After two years of controversy, the secretary of health and human services, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, has removed AIDS-virus infection from the list of sicknesses that can keep someone from entering the United States, federal officials said yesterday.Dr. Sullivan's new list includes only infectious tuberculosis, the only common deadly disease that can be passed by casual contact. The list of diseases once included more than half a dozen disorders.The Immigration and Naturalization Service is required to use the list to determine who will be excluded.

Youth initiatives focus of meeting County Council members Mary Kay Sigaty and Jen Terrasa have met with members of the community to discuss possible youth initiatives. Sigaty and Terrasa have invited their colleagues on the council to join them in a meeting with the group at 3 p.m. March 28 to broaden the discussion to youth initiatives, which may lead to developing legislation. The meeting will be held in the Ellicott Room of the George Howard Building, 3430 Court House Drive, Ellicott City.

CHICAGO -- Wars are drearily the same. We never learn from them. Bits of other wars come back to mind as we read, in the news, about Marco Lokar. He is an Italian athlete who was studying in America, playing college basketball for Seton Hall. When the coach of Seton Hall had his athletes start wearing American flags on their uniforms, Mr. Lokar refused -- it is not his flag, and he is a pacifist.The booings began, the threats, the calls to his home that disturbed his pregnant wife. He is going back to Trieste, abandoning his hopes for an American education.

NEW YORK -- In the two years since Congress passed tough laws to stem the flow of illegal immigration to the United States, federal authorities have deported almost 300,000 immigrants to countries all over the world, more than twice the number of people who were sent back in the two years before.The unprecedented number of deportations has been possible because for the first time the Immigration and Naturalization Service has both the congressional mandate and the money to investigate and prosecute violators of immigration law, arrest immigrants with criminal convictions and would-be immigrants at the border and swiftly deport them from the United States -- sometimes in fewer than 12 hours.

WASHINGTON - Congress' Sept. 11 inquiry might be providing the public new insight into the intelligence community's failures, but it's doing little to dampen the demand by victims' relatives for a full investigation of other facets of the attacks. As the House-Senate intelligence committee conducted its second day of public hearings yesterday probing why intelligence agencies didn't fully assess the risk al-Qaida posed to the United States, Sept. 11 families gained new congressional support for an independent blue-ribbon commission.

The Justice Department is investigating complaints from women held at the Krome Service Processing Center near Miami who said they had witnessed or were victims of sexual assaults by Immigration and Naturalization Service guards. While the latest investigation began last month, lawyers and advocates for immigrants, as well as some Krome employees, have been expressing concerns about abuse of detainees and corruption at the center for years. The more recent accusations came in a report released yesterday in New York City by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, an international advocacy group.

'Green Card'Starring Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell.Directed by Peter Weir.Released by Touchstone.Rated PG-13.***These are tough days on the politically correct. Not only have they been cuffed around violently in both Newsweek and New York magazines, but today two defiantly politically incorrect movies arrive, strutting with bodacious contempt.The louder of these by far is John Milius' browbeating "Flight of the Intruder"; but the better -- also by far -- is Peter Weir's brilliantly off-center "Green Card."

'Green Card Day' for immigrantsA local Jewish immigration aid agency sponsored a "Green Card Day" for recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union so that they could apply for their residency cards earlier than usual.Officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at HIAS offices on Park Heights Avenue interviewed 193 immigrants seeking green cards, which show permanent residency status in this country. The service was sponsored by the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, the immigration service agency of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.

In his most extensive comments yet on a debate that is emerging as a campaign issue nationally, Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley predicted Thursday that Arizona's controversial new immigration law would be "problematic" and costly. "I believe this law is problematic in the long term, especially as it will inevitably be applied," O'Malley told Washington radio station WTOP. The Arizona law, which takes effect this month, requires police in that border state to determine the immigration status of a suspect they have stopped for any reason if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the individual is in the country illegally.