Pubdate: Sat, 18 Nov 2000
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2000 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190
Fax: (408) 271-3792
Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/
Author: Kevin G. Hall, Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau

MAN ADOPTED BY U.S. FAMILY IS DEPORTED FOR SMALL POT SALE

Brazilian'S Treatment Reflects Strict Laws Against Drug Trafficking, 
Inflexible Rules

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Among the men with weather-beaten faces who lined the 
peach-colored walls of the Arsenal da Esperanca shelter, waiting in the 
Friday afternoon 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 had been deported to Brazil a day earlier by the U.S. 
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 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 7.5 ounces of marijuana to an undercover officer in Wadsworth, 
Ohio, outside 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 
non-citizens 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 now a stranger to Brazil.

He remembers no Portuguese, and aside from his adoptive parents in Ohio, he 
has no one to call family. A fan of the Cleveland Browns, he will now have 
to learn about Brazilian football, the kind that's played with the feet and 
called soccer in the United States.

``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 here 
late Thursday, and, as his eyes widened in horror, crammed into his 
elevator with their microphones. As they swarmed into the shelter for an 
invited tour Friday, Herbert escaped with a family friend. He had not 
returned by early evening.

Vasco Monteiro, a director of the shelter, said he had received several 
calls from people and companies wanting to help Herbert, ``so I don't think 
he will stay with us for very long.''

In July, Ohio Gov. Robert Taft rejected a parole board's clemency 
recommendation and described Herbert as a drug trafficker who had shown no 
remorse. Herbert's family says its adopted son is a distraught young man 
who now regrets having fallen in with the wrong crowd.

Immigration and Naturalization Service official 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.

She said more than 69,000 legal and illegal immigrants were deported for 
criminal acts in fiscal year 2000, which ended 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 
Oct. 30, and it is retroactive for children now aged 18 and younger. That 
doesn't help Herbert, either, since he's 22.

``We think that there is a Kafkaesque situation for adopted children coming 
to this country,'' Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to the United 
States, said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Barbosa said Brazil had accepted Herbert for ``humanitarian reasons.''
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