Pubdate: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 Source: Columbus Dispatch (OH) Copyright: 2000, The Columbus Dispatch Contact: 34 S. Third St., Columbus, OH 43215 Website: http://www.dispatch.com/ Author: Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers DEPORTATION RULES PUT OHIO MAN IN BRAZIL Drug Arrest Is Behind Immigrant's Expulsion SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Among the men with weather-beaten faces who lined the peach-colored walls of the Arsenal da Esperanca shelter, waiting yesterday in the sun for a free dinner and a bunk, was a frightened 22-year-old from Ohio. Many of the men are alcoholics, jobless or both. All of them are homeless. Joao Herbert is pudgy, with the softness of a Blockbuster counterman. He had been deported to Brazil a day earlier by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service because he was caught selling a small amount of marijuana before his application to become an American citizen was processed. The Herbert case is likely to reverberate throughout the United States and Latin America. It is a sad tale of a well-meaning attempt to crack down on drug trafficking, inflexible regulators and a governor who rejected the unanimous decision of his parole board to grant clemency and avoid deporting a first-time offender convicted of a minor crime. Orphaned as an infant in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, Herbert was adopted by an American couple in 1986, when he was 8. His adoptive parents failed to naturalize him, however, and when he was 18, police arrested him for selling 7 1/2 ounces of marijuana to an undercover cop in Wadsworth, about 30 miles south of Cleveland. Herbert was sentenced to probation as a first-time offender, but he was imprisoned under a 1996 federal law that requires the deportation of noncitizens convicted of drug crimes. To escape incarceration, Herbert stopped fighting extradition after 28 months and accepted deportation to the country of his birth, even though he's a stranger to Brazil. He remembers no Portuguese, and aside from his adoptive parents in Ohio, he has no one to call family. "I think everything will be hard for him,'' said Isabel del Pozo, whose Arsenal da Esperanca (Hope Arsenal) agreed to take Herbert in. Brazilians, who consider his U.S. treatment harsh, can't get enough of Herbert. More than two dozen reporters overwhelmed him at the airport Thursday, and, as his eyes widened in horror, crammed into his elevator with their microphones. As they swarmed into the shelter for a tour yesterday, Herbert escaped with a family friend. He had not returned by early evening. In July, Gov. Bob Taft rejected a parole board's clemency recommendation, described Herbert as a drug trafficker and said he had shown no remorse. Herbert's family says their adopted son is a distraught young man who regrets having fallen in with the wrong crowd. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said in a telephone interview that the agency had no discretion under the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. "As a law-enforcement agency, it is our responsibility to enforce the law, and if we start enforcing the law on a selective basis, it is a very slippery slope,'' Kraushaar said. The spokeswoman said more than 69,000 legal and illegal aliens were deported for criminal acts in fiscal year 2000, which ended on Sept. 30. Some 44 percent of those were drug-related deportations like the Herbert case, she said. Deportations totaled 181,572 in fiscal year 2000. The INS is weighing policy changes to give its attorneys greater leeway in determining which deportation prosecutions they pursue. They will come too late for Herbert. Additionally, Congress passed a law this year giving children adopted abroad by U.S. citizens immediate citizenship. President Clinton signed it on Oct. 30, and it is retroactive for children now 18 or younger. That doesn't help Herbert, either, because he's 22. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake