Even If Days Are Numbered, Ezell Is Making Them Count

He may be in the twilight of his tenure as the West’s top immigration official, but Harold Ezell isn’t about to change his ways.

Told the other day that hundreds of illegal immigrants were dealing drugs at a street corner near downtown Los Angeles, an alarmed Ezell ordered subordinates at a staff meeting to assign five Immigration and Naturalization Service agents to accompany undercover police officers in checking out the situation.

“Then,” he added, “we ought to have a news conference with Chief (Daryl F.) Gates in front of a black and white patrol car. We gotta go out front on this and let people know.”

Ezell denied that the contemplated news conference was grandstanding--a criticism that has dogged him during his nearly 6 1/2 years as the INS’ Western regional commissioner. But ever the showman, he grinned broadly when reminded that he had thought up yet another opportunity for media exposure.

“Hey man, what you see and hear is what you get,” he said. “I’m not going to roll over and play dead.”

Easily the nation’s most ardent immigration official, Ezell, 52, appears to be on the way out after the chief U.S. Justice Department spokesman said a week ago that he was as a “short-termer” who is likely to be relieved of his duties soon. The INS is part of the Justice Department.

Ezell had hoped to stay on the job until November, 1990, when the second phase of the landmark amnesty program ends. “All of our efforts will go down the toilet unless we keep working to make this a success,” he said.

But the bad news, for the most part, didn’t faze the portly former fast-food executive as he worked last week in his top-floor office in the so-called “Ziggurat” federal building, a fortress of a structure in Laguna Niguel.

He hasn’t backed away, either, from many of the strident pronouncements that have won him plaudits and bricks over the years:

Despite the funds for more Border Patrol agents in the 1986 Immigration Law that also extended amnesty, Ezell still believes America is under siege from the flow of illegal aliens.

He is of the opinion that criminal aliens are responsible for 70% of all drug dealing in the United States.

He still contends that most Latino and immigration activists are political opportunists who care little about individual aliens. “I don’t respect activist types who are for the rights of people, but I didn’t see them do diddley-squat in amnesty,” he says.

And except for admitting a mistake in attending a party hosted last August by Ferdinand Marcos in Honolulu, Ezell maintains he did nothing wrong by leading a prayer asking for the safe return of the deposed Philippines president to his homeland to bury his mother. The affair occurred at a time when the Justice Department was investigating the exiled Marcos and his wife, Imelda, for allegedly smuggling government funds out of their homeland.

During his recent workweek, Ezell still arrived at his office each morning at 7 and put in a full day, ranging from a recent amnesty applicant’s plea for an emergency visa to Hungary to a roundup of suspected illegal immigrants hired by two resort hotels in San Diego.

He occasionally played with a citizenship button that proclaimed, “Go for It!” as he worked in his office, a shrine filled with a vast collection of statues, books, portraits and other mementos of Ezell’s hero, Abraham Lincoln. Ezell was born on Lincoln’s birthday.

Over the course of a recent afternoon, Ezell eagerly laid out his thoughts on a variety of topics. All one had to do was ask:

- What the nation must do by 2000 to curb illegal immigration: “We’ve made a good start by making it illegal to hire illegal aliens. Somehow, America has to have a tamper-proof Social Security card. It has to come to that . . . with the proliferation of fraudulent documents that aliens have. If the Bank of America can verify purchases on their credit cards every day, why can’t we have a machine-readable card that can verify employment eligibility? We could charge $10 for a new card. Aren’t the borders of America worth ten bucks to you? The other choice is to put the military on the border.”

Civil rights advocates and others have opposed a national identification card as an Orwellian device that would restrict individual rights.

- The sanctuary movement: “The liberation theologians have been very active in the sanctuary movement and I think that it’s been the biggest Trojan horse. Well-meaning people have been misled by a lot of people who have no concern for the aliens. They only have concern for their own political agenda . . . to get America out of Central America . . . to get us to quit support of the struggling democracies of El Salvador (and) Guatemala and let (Nicaraguan leader Daniel) Ortega and his thugs take over Central America for communism.”

Ezell apologized last year after INS agents raided a Santa Ana church that had declared itself a sanctuary, arresting an alien who sought political asylum.

- On the many Latino and immigration activists who have criticized him over the years: “I think that some of them have a culture rap that they can’t get off of. They can’t distinguish between what is legal, what is right, what the law says and some of their ethnic or culture rap. They can’t separate the two. I think I can. You don’t hear me promoting only English-French-German-Irish people coming through legal immigration. That’s happens to be my heritage. Other groups--the Chinese, the Koreans, the Armenians--don’t criticize us that way. Only the Hispanic groups do.”

- On criticism that the INS is an anti-Latino agency: “I think the INS has made a lot of improvements. Better than 35% of the 5,500 (INS employees in the Western region) are Hispanic--that’s pretty incredible. Every sworn officer of the Immigration Service must speak Spanish. That’s makes for a very sensitive group of people.”

- On why he is publicity-conscious: “I was watching ’60 Minutes’ and they had this story on the sanctuary movement. When it came to the INS, there was no comment. All they showed was the Justice Department sign in Washington, D.C. I’m sitting at home with my wife and I turned to her and say, ‘Hey, Lee, that’s absolutely ridiculous.’ Somebody ought to say something even if it’s wrong . . . . They ought to show their faces. (I decided) . . . there’s never going to be a story out of this region where there’s no comment period.”

Ezell, a Republican Party loyalist who abhors the term “bureaucrat,” brought a different style to a job that had been filled by low-key career INS officers who shunned the limelight. He replaced some ranking INS managers to pump new blood into a tired agency that critics said was slow, cumbersome and insensitive in dealing with the public.

He also worked tirelessly to allay aliens’ fears about the INS once the landmark amnesty program began in 1987. Many give him the majority of the credit for the program’s relative success in the West, where more than 60% of the 3 million aliens who applied for amnesty live.

“Not everything I’ve done has been wonderful and perfect,” he said, glancing out his office window. “But it’s been done with total commitment and done with the desire to do it better for the people that I work for.”

He is a man who seemingly enjoys talking his way into hot water.

In 1985, for example, he sounded an apocalyptic warning about America’s borders that Latino and immigration activists interpreted as an attempt to whip up an hysteria against illegal immigrants.

Alien Invasion

“We’re being invaded,” he said at the time. “I feel a great fear inside me. It’s not going to be the same America in five years if we don’t do something about the immigration problem.”

The next year, he had this to say about a new procedure to process and prosecute illegals who tried to cross the border with phony documents: “If you catch ‘em, you ought to clean ‘em and fry ‘em.”

The comment created a storm of protests and calls for his ouster.

“I think of all the statements (as commissioner), that is the one that I regret,” he said. “It had the handles that everyone could turn around and use against me. It’s an old law-enforcement term but . . . I haven’t used it since.”

The lilt in his voice seemed to fade when the talk turned to the Marcos party last August and the speculation that his days with the INS are numbered. As a political appointee, Ezell routinely handed in his resignation when George Bush became President.

“I’ve already resigned,” he said softly, “and it’s just a question of whether they’ll accept it. I don’t think the Marcos thing had a bearing in that. It was a very innocent event we went to and now it seems to be some evil high-roller event.

“I made no proclamation that he (Ferdinand Marcos) ought to return to the Philippines and resume power. There’s no government policy that says I can’t pray for a guy who wants to go home to bury his mother.”

As he discussed the affair’s ramifications, Ezell called INS Hawaii District Director William Craig, who had invited him to the Marcos party. Craig, Ezell said, had assured him that superiors in Washington knew he was attending the party and saw nothing wrong with it.

It was evident during the telephone call that Ezell bore no ill feelings toward his subordinate in Hawaii.

“Hey Billy, how’s it going?” Ezell playfully asked. “You back on top?”

The commissioner at one point looked irritated--the first visible change in his demeanor in several hours--as he listened. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he finally said. “I’m telling the same story over and over and over again. I’m getting a little tired of it.”

Then, an assistant poked her head into his office to say that yet another reporter had called for an interview. Shaking his head, Ezell was his old self again.

“These guys are all trying to write an obituary and I’m not even dead,” he quipped.