Refugees El Salvador

A convoy of Salvadoran refugees, many of them children born in neighboring Honduras, crossed the border to return to their homeland. A total of 836 refugees left the Mesa Grande camp, 24 miles inside Honduras, and crossed into El Salvador at the El Poy border post, 55 miles north of San Salvador. "They were happy as anything to return to their country, with their chickens and pigs and a few belongings," said immigration official Rafael Meza.

With the earth finally calm and most of the dead at last laid to rest, Salvadorans turned Wednesday to their country's growing refugee crisis. More than 45,000 people remained homeless, with little sign that the government had any concrete plan to rebuild and repopulate towns and neighborhoods leveled by the 7.6 earthquake that ripped through El Salvador on Saturday.

An immigrant rights group filed a class-action suit Thursday on behalf of thousands of Salvadoran refugees, claiming the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is charging prohibitively high fees to refugees applying for temporary safe haven in this country.

President Clinton signed a bill Wednesday granting permanent residency to an immigrant who came from El Salvador as a 10-year-old and grew up here without his parents. The bill, introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in January, passed the Senate in late September and the House in October. The last step was the president's signature. "I'm crying, I can't believe it finally happened," said Tony Lara, 20, who lives in Northridge with his high school wrestling coach.

One man told of being forced into a pool of electrified water. A teacher testified that he was dragged out of the classroom over his students' wails of protest and interrogated for 15 days about a kidnaping he knew nothing about. Raul Sosa Rodriguez was 14 years old when government agents lined him up with a dozen other prisoners along the edge of a cliff and began killing them one by one with machetes, hurtling their bodies onto the rocks below.

Three Salvadoran refugees in San Francisco went 24 days without food in a fast designed to protest U.S. policies toward Salvadorans seeking political asylum. Gilma Cruz, 22; Jose Cartagena, 26, and Jeremias Ruiz ended the fast Sunday at St. John's Lutheran Church. "We are ending the fast with a strong call to the North American people to go (into) the streets and demonstrate against the war in El Salvador," said Cartegena.

A hearing has been scheduled for Monday in federal court in Brownsville, Tex., on a motion to overturn the U.S. government's policy of forcing Central American refugees to remain in South Texas while their asylum applications are processed. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had allowed refugees to travel to their destination cities to await evaluation. But last Dec.

A Roman Catholic priest said a Southern California church worker helping refugees in El Salvador was attacked Sunday by assailants believed to be members of a death squad. Father Michael Kennedy of Our Lady of Queen of Angels Church said it was believed to be the first attack on an American church worker in the civil war-torn country since three Catholic nuns and a Catholic lay worker were raped and slain in 1982.

The pale hands of Albuquerque poet and free-lance journalist Demetria Martinez trembled as she held the poem that has come to symbolize her status as newest cause celebre of the American Sanctuary movement. But that first image of frailty changed as Martinez--wrapped in a black rebozo--recited her poem, "Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987," to the audience filling the pews of a former Presbyterian church, now slightly haggard Pacific Symphony Concert Hall in Santa Ana.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said it will move its main immigrant asylum hearing center to downtown Anaheim by June. For the past year, most local asylum hearings have been held at temporary offices in the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel. Asylum hearings also have been held in downtown Los Angeles, and some will continue to be held there, said Rosemary Melville, INS regional asylum director.

President Clinton signed a bill Wednesday granting Tony Lara, who came from El Salvador as a 10-year-old and grew up here without his parents, permanent U.S. residency. The bill, introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in January, passed the Senate in late September and the House in October. The last step was the president's signature. "I'm crying.

The secret to life in America, Manuel Garcia says, is credit. He slaps the dash and says it emphatically: "Cheap credit." The dash is attached to a 1998 Freightliner Classic Raised Roof SleeperCab with 13 forward gears, two backward and 410 horses under its canary-yellow hood. It's an early evening dressed in warm light and long shadow. The dash, the Freightliner and Manuel are southbound on Interstate 5, climbing the hill out of La Jolla, pulling a load of Lompoc broccoli and lettuce.

Friends and neighbors gathered outside Francisco Ayala's East Hollywood apartment building, eager to catch a last glimpse of a bright red ambulance before it left Saturday on its mission of mercy to a small, impoverished town in El Salvador. Ayala and a group of former neighbors from the town of Estanzuelas raised $6,000 to buy the ambulance, which Ayala kept in his apartment garage.

FRANCISCO AYALA BUFFED THE freshly waxed surface of the ambulance one last time, then stood back to admire the gleaming red results. The letters on the side stood out clearly: " Unidad de Salud de Estanzuelas, Departamento de Usulutan ," the name of the health clinic in a small town nestled in the mountains of eastern El Salvador.

They came as waves of refugees fleeing warfare, most anticipating a short stay until the violence subsided. But eventually, the vast majority settled down and adapted to life in the United States, abandoning hopes of ever moving back to their ravaged homeland.

The future took an uncertain turn Friday for Elena Subialdea and other Salvadoran expatriates in Orange County, when U.S. immigration officials announced the lifting of special deferments from deportation for El Salvador nationals at the end of the month. Like others who heard the news from a radio broadcast or friend, Subialdea reacted with shock and confusion.

FRANCISCO AYALA BUFFED THE freshly waxed surface of the ambulance one last time, then stood back to admire the gleaming red results. The letters on the side stood out clearly: " Unidad de Salud de Estanzuelas, Departamento de Usulutan ," the name of the health clinic in a small town nestled in the mountains of eastern El Salvador.

THE CONVOY of more than five-score trucks rumbles through the barbed-wire gates of the Colomoncagua refugee camp in Honduras. It is February, 1990, and this is about the 10th group to depart in the past month. Those remaining behind line the roadway for the joyful, albeit tense, leave-taking, waving and wishing good fortune to loved ones and neighbors; their time to follow will come soon. All face danger and uncertainty.

The Clinton Administration is expected to announce today that it will end a special refugee program for Salvadoran immigrants, but will use procedures that make it unlikely any would be deported for at least two years--and perhaps far longer, officials said.

Already unsettled by Proposition 187, Southern California's huge Salvadoran exile community is bracing for another possible blow: next month's scheduled expiration of a program that has allowed tens of thousands of Salvadoran immigrants to remain in the United States legally for years. While most experts agree that large-scale deportations are unlikely, rumors of such extreme action have sent a shudder through Salvadoran expatriate neighborhoods from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.