BY HARRY RING

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction here halting the government's deportation proceedings against two of the political activists known as the Los Angeles 8.

The ruling was made on grounds of selective prosecution. Earlier, U.S. district judge Stephen Wilson issued a similar injunction covering the other six.

The April 29 decision poses an advance challenge to the constitutionality of key provisions in the "antiterrorist" law signed by President William Clinton in April. The new statute denies noncitizens due process of law in deportation proceedings.

The government has been trying to deport the eight - seven Palestinians and a Kenyan - since 1987. They are charged with being supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Washington brands the PLFP "terrorist."

When arrested, the eight were charged with advocating "communism," based on the thought-control McCarran-Walter Act. But in 1988, Wilson ruled key sections of the act unconstitutional and the Justice Department then moved to get them deported under Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) regulations. The INS is a division of the Justice Department.

Six of the eight are here on visas and, until Wilson ordered a halt to the proceedings, the INS was trying to deport them on grounds of technical violations of their visas.

The other two, Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide, are permanent residents. To be deported, they must be stripped of that status. To that end, an INS judge has held protracted hearings in which the Justice Department has presented a pile of hearsay evidence, such as newspaper clippings, to establish that the PFLP is "terrorist." These hearings are now halted by the judge's ruling.

Last November, the Ninth District Court of Appeals upheld earlier rulings by Wilson that noncitizens are entitled to the same First Amendment guarantees of free speech as citizens, and that secret evidence cannot be used in deportation proceedings.

In his current finding that the Justice Department selectively prosecuted the eight, Wilson scoffed at the government contention that the decision to prosecute was made solely by a lawyer in the Los Angeles office of the INS.

Wilson declared, "Abundant evidence shows that higher-up national and regional INS officials, as well as representatives of the FBI, were involved in the decision-making process."

Buttressing his finding, the judge noted an absence of effort to deport supporters of such groups as the Nicaraguan contras, which in the 1980s sought, unsuccessfully, to defeat the Nicaraguan revolution.

Pointing to the government's hearsay evidence of PFLP "terrorism," Wilson said none of it showed that the eight had been "implicated in any way."

The injunctions against the Justice Department were won by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which went into federal court early on to challenge the government moves to railroad the eight out of the country.

David Cole of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is a member of the eight's legal team, hailed the judge's ruling. "This is a tremendous decision," he declared. "It says that the government cannot deport immigrants for simply expressing unpopular views. Government evidence showed that our clients had, at most, distributed literature, engaged in political demonstrations, and raised money for lawful activities."

"Today's decision confirms that all people in the United States have a First Amendment right to do just that."

Co-attorney Marc Van Der Hout of the National Lawyers Guild added, "We hope the government will take this opportunity to reconsider their long-standing efforts to deport our clients."

So far, the government has not indicated what its next move will be.  
 
 
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