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.