The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 3

Sunday, August 1. 1982Part I 3 Couple Deported; Children Left on Own INS Raid: The Pain of Separation CoaAnflcUfl mte luff -g Concerned relatives at the gate of a factory raided by INS authorities last spring. But an uncle, friends from work, and members of the Hermandad dc Trabaja-dores Mexicanos in Pacoima Brotherhood of Mexican Workers), a group acting as a liaison between undocumented aliens and labor unions, brought the children food and money while their parents were gone. Although the children were safe, Rebecca and Aurelio had no way of knowing that. They were arrested in different parts of the plant and the immigration agents did not find out that they were married.

And they did not volunteer that fact. Aurelio said, since those apprehended try to withhold details about themselves to avoid being identified by immigration authorities. Positive identification cf a person deported several times can prevent that person from legally emigrating later, said an agency spokesman. It can also mean fines and a jail sentence if a person were caught and identified several times. Held Separately Aurelio and Rebecca were first separated when they were led into different vans that transported them to section B-17, the temporary holding facility in the basement of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Men and Women were taken to different rooms in the building. Before being questioned, Aurelio considered asking for a hearing to appeal deportation. But he said he began to have second thoughts when an agent threatened to detain him for three months and set his bail at $5,000. Seeing his wife through a darkened window as she walked into a room with those who agreed to voluntary departure helped him make up his mind. The possibility of his being detained and of Rebecca struggling to cross the border could mean that his children would be left by themselves for weeks, he said.

Aurelio signed the voluntary departure form, as had Rebecca. "My back was to the wall. Anyway, God willing, I'll go to Tijuana, leave and in three days I'll be back," he said to himself. By VICTOR M. VALLK.

Timet Staff Writer Aurclio Norte is a part-time accordion player, and when he gets off from his factory job, he often sings in the cantinas of San Fernando about those deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In dreary cantinas where men like him gather, he sings as one who knows the pain of being separated for days from his children. In April, he and his wife. Rebecca, were apprehended for the first time at a Pacoima mail order company where they had worked more than four years. They were among the hundreds of undocumented aliens deported in "Operation Jobs," a week of factory raids designed to remove illegals from jobs that could be held by unemployed U.S.

citizens and legal residents. Aurelio and Rebecca eventually got their jobs back, as did most workers seized at their plant. But for the Nortes, the cost was especially high. Aurelio was separated from his wife and six children for 16 days, during which time he made seven unsuccessful attempts to recrpss the border from Mexico. Rebecca returned home 10 days later on her fourth attempt.

'Suffered the Most' "Of all the people arrested in the raid, we suffered the most," Aurelio said. "We suffered physically, we suffered spiritually." Aurelio, 42, has squared, weathered features that make him appear older. His voice is coarse, restrained and proud. He brought his family to this country more than four years ago to escape poverty in his native state of Durango. Rebecca, 40, has smooth, gentle features.

In her voice you can hear the twang of northern Mexico. Her eyes reflect the sound of humiliation in her husband's voice. "You feel bad. you feel bound, you feel very small," Aurelio said, recalling how he felt when immigration agents entered the plant. A female immigration agent, he said.

In the week that followed, the couple and three other friends from work made scver- al aborted attempts to cross the border. Their first try began with a pollero, a person who guides people past the border fence to a coyote waiting to take them to Los Angeles. Arrived Near Fence After meeting their guide outside their hotel early one evening, they rode a bus to the border, arriving near the fence while there still was light. "You have to get to the line early," Aurelio said, "because once it gets dark, you have to watch out for the judiciales (plainclothes Mexican police They're more dan -gerous than immigration (border patrol). "They take all your money and beat you, and accuse you of trafficking in marijuana.

They do this to scare people. If you try to talk. your rights, God help you." They walked under the fence through a dry canal just north of the Play as de Tijuana and hid behind a large tree waiting for the dark. Late that night the group began crawling thrbugh the brush and through mud. Border patrolmen in a Jeep were parked not far Off; They were almost spotted near a dirt Please see RAID, Page 27 questioned and then handcuffed him, which he found especially embarrassing.

"I was afraid, I was shaking, I saw the rest of the people hiding. I ran to hide." Rebecca said, recalling her thoughts as the raid began. "They searched for us as if we were inhuman," Aurelio said of the way the agents pushed over boxes and packages to get at workers who hid. "And when they put us in the van, one of the agents said 'Boys, yell Viva La Migra! He was laughing, inflaming us, acting like a big shot. "I didn't say anything when he did that, I just thought, my God, how things turn out.

I was, as they say, crying inside, because I left my children at home, alone." Fortunately, their 18-year-old daughter Marisela was not picked up in the raid. She was on her break at a corner food stand when the agents arrived. Her friends at work told Marisela that her parents had been taken, and then took her home. "They broke out crying all at once," Marisela said, after she told her three sisters and three brothers the youngest 6 years old what had happened. "And me without money and food," she said.

"It seemed pretty hard, pretty ugly. I had to stop working to stay home with sisters and brothers." JOBS: Most Aliens Arrested in INS Sweep Back at Work, Survey of Factories Reveals That night, he began his ride back to Mexico in a bus filled with men like himself. He arrived without sleep in San Luis Rio Colorado in the state of Sonora about 4:30 a.m. and, figuring that Rebecca had been sent to Tijuana, he boarded the next bus for there. However, Rebecca arrived in San Luis one hour later.

Luckily, she decided 16 stick with her female workmates as they headed back to Tijuana. Aurelio called home when he got to Tijuana. But when he tried to ask where Rebecca was and to say where he was staying, "Tears poured down my face, and the children let out crying, begging me to come home," he said in a coarse whisper. Late that afternoon, Rebecca called home, receiving word of where Aurelio was waiting. She walked into the poorly lit market and saw her husband leaning against a counter with his back facing her, she said.

"We met, we talked, we lamented, and then we telephoned the family," he said. "Then we began thinking about how to get back." He and his wife had hidden $220 between them in the heels of their shoes, which they would use to survive if they were ever deported and to pay a coyote to smuggle them across the border. idents might take. In the past, the agency had been criticized for rounding up illegal aliens in low-paying jobs for which there was insufficient domestic labor. The reaction from most employers to Operation Jobs was summed up recently by Walter Gibson, controller at Carolyn Shoes Inc.

in Monterey Park: "I think if the announced purpose was making jobs they failed because they did not create jobs. Now, if their purpose was to harass those people who didn't take the time to document themselves, then they succeeded." Some employers disputed the INS con- It 'did not solve the illegal immigration problem or the unemployment problem. tention that the raids involved workers in higher-paying jobs, and several complained that production lines had to be shut down. The immigration service is evaluating the effectiveness of the raids. No decision has been made whether to continue them.

Philip Smith, assistant district director for investigations at the agency's Los Angeles office, said one week was not enough time to adequately test the effectiveness of Operation Jobs. The experiment would have had greater impact if 1,000 suspected illegal aliens had Continued from First Page residents who were hired to fill vacancies did not stay on the job, either because they believed that the pay was too low or because the working conditions were not to their liking. Wages averaged $4.80 an hour in the Los Angeles-Orange County area and ranged from the minimum $3.35 an hour to $7.50 an hour, the INS has reported. One firm, where wages ranged from $3.35 to $4 an hour, reported hiring 90 new workers immediately after the raids. But Rudy Pompa, employment manager of the B.P.

John Furniture Co. in Santa Ana, said 75 of them quit shortly after. "They told me they found another job, that the work was too hard, that there wasn't enough pay. One tried to provoke the foreman to fire him in order to collect unemployment. His benefits had run out and he was looking for an extension," Pom-pa said.

Hal Takier, personnel manager of West American Rubber Co. in Orange said, "The Americans? None of them stayed; maybe 1. It isn't the work. It's just that they feel like they want something better, whether they have education or not." When 10 arrested workers returned, Takier said, "I was just glad to get 'em back." Operation Jobs, executed at a cost of $500,000 nationally, including $160,000 to transport deportees to the border, was an experiment to determine whether the INS should concentrate enforcement efforts on illegal aliens holding supposedly "higher-paying" jobs that Americans and legal res By RON HARRIS, Urban in CON KEYES Los Angeles Times Most are back on the job. illegal aliens.

Men arrested in Pacoima as suspected Urban League's New Director League Convenes Frustration, Anger been picked up every week for several weeks, he said. "But in depressed economy, it did accomplish something," he added. "It focused attention on the immigration problem It did accomplish the goal of getting people to zero in on employment opportunities in which illegal aliens were arrested but it certainly did not solve the illegal immigration problem or the unemployment problem." Two weeks after the raids, the INS conducted an "informal survey" of factories in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston to determine how many U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents were hired to replace the arrested workers. Other cities included in the sweep were Detroit, Denver, Newark, New York and San Francisco.

That survey, depending on how the answers are treated statistically, indicated that between 65 and 70 of the jobs vacated by arrested workers had been filled by Americans or legal residents, based on employers' answers. INS spokesman Bob Walsh in Washington, D.C., said the survey had no "scientific credibility" and that the government had no way of knowing whether employers answered truthfully. Thirty-one of the 39 firms contacted agreed to answer the agency's questions. Unlike the INS survey, in which respondents were asked to volunteer information to a law enforcement agency that might act on the information obtained. The Times Please see JOBS, Page 24 Suspect Dies After Police UseChokehold By JULIE LEVY and HERBERT A.

SAMPLE, Times Staff Writers A black South-Central Los Angeles man suspected of being under the influence of PCP died Saturday after a Los Angeles police officer applied a modified carotid choke-hold to subdue him. Donald R. Wilson, 23, was pronounced dead at 8:37 a.m. at Coun-ty-USC Medical Center after doctors failed to revive him with car-dio-pulmonary rescusitation, Lt. Charles Higbie said.

He said it was not clear when Wilson stopped breathing but that officers believed he was still alive when they took him to the hospital. Moratorium in Effect The Los Angeles Police Commission on May 12 imposed a six-month moratorium on the use of all choke-holds by officers except when there is the threat of great bodily injury or death. Wilson was handcuffed and his ankles were bound, police said. Cmdr. William Booth said that whether the chokehold was applied properly or at the right time will not be decided until after an investigation.

Police refused to say Saturday night if Wilson was black. But a mortuary assistant at County-USC said he was. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates has come under fire for suggesting last May that Please see CHOKEHOLD, Page 19 Timing Is Questionable, Jacob Appointment Isn Jt Times Staff Writer If more than double that of whites and the highest since World War II. More than half of the nation's black teen-agers cannot find work. And as blacks of middle income, who achieved a sense of financial security via the civil rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s, fall prey to layoffs in the public and private sectors, "They are finding that they are just one paycheck away from poverty," said Jimmy Williams, league director of communications.

During the conference, delegates will wrestle with those and other issues in 20 workshops with topics such as Reaganomics, block grants, education, private industry partnership, minority business development, housing, crime and even black images in movies and The National Urban League, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, kicked off its 72nd annual convention today at the Los Angeles Convention Center against a gloomy backdrop of frustration and anger provoked by what members see as "the challenge of the New Federalism." For the next four days, 10,000 delegates and participants from 118 Urban League affiliates across the nation will search for ways to combat rampant black unemployment, massive federal budget cutbacks in social programs and federal legislation which they say will further erode black progress. Even as the organization grapples with those problems, it finds its own power to address such issues diminished substantially by some of the same ills that it seeks to cure. Federal budget cuts reduced funding for Urban League programs from $29 million to $11 million and forced the layoff of 1,000 workers, one-fourth of the organization's staff. Urban League National Director John E. Jacob said: "There has never been a more critical time for black people and people who care to come together about the state of affairs and its impact on black, poor and disadvantaged people." When John E.

Jacob, the new executive director of the Urban League, was named last December to succeed Vernon Jordan as head of the 72-year-old civil rights organization, he thought about the tough times ahead and shook his head. "Let's put it like this," he said with a chuckle. "If I could have chosen another time, I probably would." The son of a Houston minister, Jacob, 47, must keep the organization moving forward against a tide of uncertainty. He has worked for 18 years with the Urban League, eight of those years as head of its San Diego and then Washington, D.C., offices, and the past three as Jordan's executive vice president in charge of day-to-day operations. During that tenure, he has developed a reputation as a soft-spoken, low-profile technician.

His selection over better-known figures who were mentioned for the job, notably former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, surprised many of those closely associated with the league. But none have argued with his appointment. Jacob replaced a man who was synonymous with the Urban League. Jordan, who directed the organization over the last decade, was considered a high-powered fund-raiser, a vital talent for such an organization and a man as comfortable in the nation's corporate board rooms as he was on the ora torical stand. "There are differences in style, but not in tone," Jacob said.

"I am not Vernon. I will not try to be Vernon. Our basic difference is that Vernon placed Urban League's principal role as that of advocate which also provided services. I believe our principal role is to provide services while continuing to be an advocate for the needs of black, brown and disadvantaged people. There will be greater focus on the involvement of services." As director, the boyish -looking Jacob will now have to assume Jor-don's role of soliciting funds, a task in which his avocations of golf and tennis have come in handy.

'A Strategy for Networking' "I've always played golf because I liked it, but now I know why many of the corporate people play golf," he said. "It's a strategy for networking. He admits that he has had to reconcile within himself the task of handling the organization in tumultuous times. "A friend of mine best described the way I feel about it," he said. "We were playing golf and he hit his ball into a sand trap.

He was in a tough position. He pulled out his iron, and just as he was getting ready to hit the ball he winked at me and said, 'It's just another -RON HARRIS Seeking Answers They will look for answers from speakers William French Smith, U.S. attorney general; William Kiesnick, president of Atlantic Richfield; Jesse Jackson, national president of Operation PUSH; Mayor Tom Bradley, Gov. Charles Robb of Virginia and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. Urban League officials hope that delegates will be able to take the information back to their local communities and put it to work.

They admit, however, that despite all the conferences and caucusing, a Please see URBAN, Page 28 The cold statistics reflecting a declining black life style cannot be brushed aside, Urban League staffers say. Black unemployment is 18.7, LARRY BESSEL Lot Angela Tim el John E. Jacob of Urban League: 'Never a more critical.