No justice for immigrants.

• Position: Abuses of 1996 immigration law - Column

The 1996 immigration law, which went into effect on April 1, 1997, is beginning to take a terrible toll. Refugees fleeing persecution and torture in their home countries can be summarily turned away from U.S. airports by INS agents, who no longer have to grant them a proper hearing. In New York and other cities, restaurants and factories that depend on immigrant labor have had to close their doors because a mass exodus has emptied their kitchens and assembly lines. Immigrants waiting for green cards risk deportation if they don't go straight home until their papers arrive.

In a catch-22, a provision of the new law states that once they leave the country, immigrants who waited for more than six months while the INS processed their green-card applications can be banned from returning for three years. And if they remained in this country for a year without documents, they might not be able to return to the United States for ten years--even if they filed for a visa on their first day here.

Worse, legal immigrants who leave the country and then return--even after a brief vacation--may be subject to harassment and imprisonment without due process if they have any criminal record. This is true for the most minor infractions. Theft of cable-television service, for example, can be treated as an "aggravated felony" under the new immigration law, and the INS may detain legal immigrants and begin deportation proceedings against them for it.

Take the case of Jesus Collado-Munoz. Collado, who was born in the Dominican Republic, has lived in the United States for more than twenty-five years. He is a legal permanent resident He married and raised his family here. His wife and daughters are all U.S. citizens. Because of the "aggravated-felony" provision in the new immigration law, Collado now sits in a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania, under threat of deportation, because of a twenty-two-year-old misdemeanor conviction.

Last March, Collado visited the Dominican Republic for two weeks. On his way home, INS agents detained him. Under questioning, Collado admitted that he'd had a brush with the law when he was nineteen years old. The mother of his then-fifteen-year-old girlfriend brought statutory sexual-assault charges against him for having consensual sex with her daughter. The two teenagers were dragged into court. Collado pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was convicted.

The INS decided to treat Collado's twenty-two-year-old conviction as an...