LOS ANGELES, Dec 19: Hundreds of people from the Middle Eastern countries were arrested by the federal immigration officials in Southern California when they complied with orders to appear at the INS offices for a special registration programme, Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.

The arrests drew thousands of people to demonstrate on Wednesday in Los Angeles.

An Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) spokesmen refused on Wednesday to say as to how many people the agency had detained, what the specific charges were or how many were still being held.

But some officials speaking anonymously said they would not dispute estimates by lawyers that the number of arrests across Southern California was 500 to 700. In Los Angeles, up to one-fourth of those who showed up to register were jailed, lawyers said.

The number of people arrested in this region appears to have been considerably larger than elsewhere in the country, perhaps because of the size of the Southland’s Iranian population.

Monday’s registration deadline applied to men of 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Men from 13 other nations, mostly in the Mideast and North Africa, are required to register next month.

Many of those arrested, according to their lawyers, had already applied for green cards and, in some instances, had interviews scheduled in the near future. Although they had overstayed their visas, attorneys argue, their clients had already taken steps to remedy the situation and were following the regulations closely.

“These are the people who have voluntarily gone” to the INS, said Mike S. Manesh of the Iranian American Lawyers Assn. “If they had anything to do with terrorism, they wouldn’t have gone.”

Immigration officials acknowledged on Wednesday that many of those taken into custody this week have status-adjustment applications pending that have not yet been acted on.