Plight of Children Held By INS Stirs Chinese : Immigrants: Chinese-Americans are rallying to help the youngsters from Fujian province who are being held at L.A. County juvenile halls. Many visit the detainees and some want to adopt them.

Some visitors came with Mandarin music videos, Chinese noodles and copies of the New Testament.

Another showed up with scissors to clip the locks of the children, whose long voyage from China’s coastal province of Fujian landed them in Los Angeles County’s juvenile detention centers.

About 150 Fujianese youngsters are behind the gates of the county’s juvenile halls, after smugglers’ efforts to shepherd them unnoticed into California failed. While the children, who range in age from 9 to 17, anxiously await release so they can join contacts here or in New York City, the Chinese-American community is rallying to assist them.

Pastors, social workers and political activists are visiting the children regularly. Some residents are clamoring to adopt them.

“The common bond between me and all these illegal immigrants is Chinese blood, flowing inside all of us. That’s the basic thing that makes me want to reach out to them,” said a youth pastor from a Chinese church in Alhambra who asked not to be identified.

“These villages by the sea have a history of sending people overseas, so these kids, they came over with big dreams. One kid told us he is planning to make $500,000 or $600,000 within six years and then he will return to enjoy the rest of his life,” he said. “It’s very sad.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service is renting county space to house the children, who arrived by ship in San Francisco and San Diego or crossed the border into the United States after landing off the rocky Mexican coast. Adults apprehended with the children were sent to INS detention facilities in San Pedro, Bakersfield and El Centro. The Los Angeles County INS district is taking juveniles from throughout the state because Probation Department space is available here.

As of Thursday, 64 boys were in the San Fernando Valley Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, 65 were in Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, and 17 girls were in the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, according to Kenneth John Elwood, INS assistant district director.

The first group arrived May 20, and others have been trickling into custody since then. About 13 have been released on bail. Reporters have not been granted access to the detention facilities to speak with the children.

According to visitors, the youths have donned jail clothes and are biding their time in dormitories, separated from other juveniles who have committed crimes. When the first group arrived, counselors from the Asian Youth Center in Rosemead provided probation officials with some basic tips--about chopsticks, Chinese checkers and how to tune in to Mandarin-language radio and television.

Now, the young Chinese wards get English lessons in the morning and spend their afternoons playing poker and reading Chinese books, volunteers said. Some probation department employees are taking a stab at Mandarin.

The children are anxious and bored, however, and find American food strange, visitors said.

Conflicts are also surfacing: Rumors have trickled out of a fight over contact phone numbers that most of the children guard closely. According to one community volunteer, a boy who is related to one of the smugglers was intimidating other boys in an effort to collect their phone numbers.

Language barriers have also increased the tension. The children understand Mandarin, but when they talk among themselves, they use their local dialect from Fujian province. Probation staff and Mandarin-speaking volunteers cannot understand them, and the children know it.

“They’re not easy to handle,” said Central Juvenile Hall Supt. Billy Burkert. Though some of the volunteers tend to view all the children as hapless victims, some of the youths are quite savvy, Burkert said.

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The well-publicized plight of Fujianese adults smuggled to the United States in the squalid hulls of ships has drawn little response from the Chinese-American community, but the minors have stirred deep compassion.

Several children told visitors tales of a 60-day journey crammed below deck in a trawler, where the food supply dwindled toward the end. Most paid $1,000 up front and guaranteed another $25,000 would follow once they arrived here.

“Some of them say their parents don’t know that they came. Others say their father is in New York,” said David Lee, a social worker with the Chinatown Service Center, who has visited the children regularly.

Lee said several children told him that smugglers threatened to beat them if relatives refused to pay up.

Some said they have attempted the trip several times, working their way to different parts of the globe before officials returned them to their homeland.

“We have kids there--it was their seventh or eighth time being smuggled out,” said the Alhambra youth pastor. Once they returned to Fujian, “they were fined or jailed for several months and beaten up very badly. Some had been to Hawaii, some to Southeast Asia, before they were turned back.”

The possibility of handing a child back to smugglers is an INS “nightmare,” Elwood said, and something his agency is guarding against: The children must be bonded out to a relative or “responsible adult authority,” whose names are checked through nationwide law enforcement databases to ensure they have no criminal record.

Children who are not claimed may be placed in foster care, an option being explored by the INS and Probation Department.

Community volunteers are looking for Chinese-speaking lawyers willing to help the youths for free.

On June 18, President Clinton announced a plan to reduce the number of smuggled Chinese and crack down on traffickers. The plan would speed up admission hearings that can now take up to three years to as little as 10 days.

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Adult immigrants apprehended off U.S. coasts will no longer be bonded out of detention. Juveniles, however, are being accorded special treatment.

“The juveniles are a specific issue, and we have guidance from headquarters that allows us to set bonds,” Elwood said.

The bond amounts vary according to age, ranging from $500 for the youngest, a 9-year-old boy, to $7,500 for the 17-year-olds, Elwood said.

Chinese community volunteers worry that once released, the children will fall back into the hands of the Asian organized crime syndicates that arranged their journeys. Many, they fear, have agreed to work off their smuggling debts as foot-soldiers for the Asian gangs that control New York City’s Chinatown and have taken root in the San Gabriel Valley.

“These young and ignorant strangers could become new recruits for the international gang world,” San Gabriel Valley activist David Ma wrote in a June 10 letter from the Chinese American Coalition to the governments of the United States and China and to the United Nations. The coalition formed last year to assist Chinese-Americans in the Los Angeles area after the 1992 riots.

Few juveniles from Mexico and Central America are apprehended in the Los Angeles area, Elwood said, and they are quickly released to the custody of family or social service agencies. The Probation Department had been offering five to 15 beds to the INS for those children. That arrangement led to a contract May 24 to house the Chinese juveniles.

While the juveniles remain in custody, community visitors say they hope to ease their minds. Visitors have sung songs with the children, translated legal documents and tried to help them reach their families and contacts in the United States.

Many have left Juvenile Hall with phone numbers thrust into their palms by the children for New York City contacts whom they were told to call upon their arrival here. Volunteers who dialed the numbers have met with a dismal response, however: suspicious voices on the other end tell them to have the children call, or they hang up.

“Some of their parents and relatives are also illegal immigrants. They are very afraid to expose themselves,” the Alhambra pastor said. “And some of the phone numbers are for second, third, or fourth cousins. Sometimes they don’t even recognize the name (of the child.)”

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Despite their best efforts, the visitors can offer little but hope to the youngsters.

“Right now, we’ve been going in and trying to encourage them. But I have no permanent solution for them,” the pastor said.

Chinese newspaper accounts of the children’s plight have elicited a strong response, particularly the case of the 9-year-old in Central Juvenile Hall who was heading for New York with his older cousin when he was arrested June 2 in the Bay Area.

Richard Chiang, a reserve probation officer who has worked with the children, said he has received more than 18 calls from people hoping to adopt them.

“One lady is really serious,” Chiang said. “She wants to adopt three girls.”

But he and other volunteers discourage the idea.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” the Alhambra pastor said. “These are not orphans. These are kids who belong with their parents somewhere else.”