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.''