POLICE ALLEGEDLY BEHIND DEPORTATIONS

LOS ANGELES -- Police officers at the city's scandal-plagued Rampart
station had the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service deport
illegal Mexican immigrants who said they witnessed police abuse.

Unidentified INS agents and a Los Angeles police officer said Rampart
officers also made lists of 10,000 alleged gang members and spent
nights rounding them up for deportation when they were supposed to be
arresting violent criminals.

The accusing officer has been identified as a key figure in the
scandal.

The INS agents voiced their concerns to their supervisors and by an
anonymous letter on INS stationery to Los Angeles County District
Attorney Gil Garcetti.

A spokeswoman for Garcetti, who has been criticized by Police Chief
Bernard Parks for failing to prosecute a single Rampart officer, said
the District Attorney's Office was trying to determine if any such
letter had been received.

Rampart officers allegedly had the INS deport 160 illegal immigrants
who might have had information about police abuse and routinely
conducted "gang sweeps" to round up illegal aliens.

One senior INS agent said that he was suspicious of the Rampart
anti-gang unit's identification of 10,000 Latino immigrants as
associates of one particularly powerful gang.

"I told my boss that was just ludicrous," he said. "They were
targeting a whole race of people. That's not a gang anymore, that's a
culture. They only wanted to do one thing: Sweep the street and turn
the bodies over to the INS."

Under Los Angeles policy, officers are ordered not to investigate
people simply because of their immigration status.

They also are barred from turning over to the INS suspects accused of
minor violations.