The Administration seemed squarely at odds with itself last week over the prickly issue of refugees from Central America. In Florida, Perry Rivkind, the district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that he would not deport citizens from Nicaragua who seek political asylum in the U.S. In Arizona, the Justice Department wound up its prosecution of eleven church workers accused of smuggling aliens from El Salvador and Guatemala into the U.S. -- even though these illegal immigrants also claimed that they feared persecution in their home countries.
The two cases reinforced the widely held impression that a double...