An array of New York political figures – including the Reverend Al Sharpton; a former City Council member from Boro Park, Noach Dear, and a candidate for attorney general, Charles King – is seeking to block a top homeland security official, Michael Garcia, from becoming U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The opposition to Mr. Garcia stems from an incident involving three black women who were removed from senior management posts in the homeland security department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, which Mr. Garcia, as an assistant secretary, oversaw. The Senate confirmed Mr. Garcia’s nomination by unanimous consent on July 29. President Bush could rescind the appointment, but that would be an extremely remote possibility. Mr. Garcia will assume his new post as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan around Labor Day, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, Heather Tasker.

As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Garcia won verdicts against several notorious terrorists, including four perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. But Mr. Dear said that the immigration agency under Mr. Garcia’s supervision came to resemble “1964 Alabama.”

One of the three women, Yvonne Smalls, said at a press conference yesterday that in December 2003, she received an anonymous, profanity-laden, racially charged letter amid discussions of a possible merger of department offices in New York and Newark. The letter warned Ms. Smalls: “If you think you are taking over Newark with your staff,” whose members were then described in sexually explicit terms, “you are DEAD WRONG.”

Ms. Smalls said that the department never heeded her request for an investigation into the origins of the letter. Given the department’s apparent inability – or unwillingness – to trace the source of the mysterious missive, Mr. Dear said, “no wonder they’re having a hard time finding Osama bin Laden.”

A spokesman for the department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, Dean Boyd, said an investigation into the origins of the letter is ongoing. Internal complaints filed by Ms. Smalls and the other two women, Charlene Monroe and Theresa Regis, list Mr. Garcia among several respondents. He was four steps above Ms. Smalls – and six steps above Ms. Monroe and Ms. Regis – on the department’s chain of command. The complaints also charge that Mr. Garcia was personally involved in the decision to remove the three women from senior management posts and replace them with white men.

The women say that they will now be fired unless they accept posts outside the New York area. Ms. Smalls was the highest-ranking black female field officer in the Deportation and Removal Operations section. Ms. Regis was head of a detention facility in Queens, and Ms. Monroe was in charge of a processing center for deportees in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Boyd, the spokesman, said the rationale behind the decision to reassign the three women is contained in an August 2004 audit that legally can only be released by the women themselves.

He said the reassignments should not be characterized as “demotions” because the women remained at the same grade and salary.

But Mr. Boyd did say the audit found that the three women, along with other members of the New York management team, “exhibited poor leadership.”

An attorney for the three women, Vera Scanlon of the firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman, said she would not release the audit because her clients received a two page summary last week – but not full text – and therefore had no chance to refute the audit’s findings. She said the summary “includes allegations that our clients either engaged in sexual harassment, or that people under them did.”

Ms. Scanlon denied the charges, and added that her clients had not been informed of any pending sexual harassment complaints filed against them. A City Council member from East New York, Charles Barron, joined Messrs. King, Dear, and Sharpton yesterday.

Mr. Dear said he joined the fight against the Garcia nomination because the three women are “family to me,” on account of their helpfulness when he contacted one of the department’s predecessor agencies, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to assist constituents facing deportation.