Deportation

City Council members Maria Quiñones Sánchez and Jim Kenney introduced a resolution Thursday urging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to halt the deportation of Zulma Villatoro, 28, a Guatemalan immigrant living in Chester who was brought illegally to the United States by her parents when she was 14 and faces expulsion July 2. The mother of a 4-year-old daughter who is a U.S. citizen, Villatoro is four months pregnant. She graduated from Chester Upland High School in 2003 and is employed by a McDonald's.

U.S. immigration authorities have canceled flights taking deportees back to parts of the Middle East during the war with Iraq. "Under threat-level orange, we're reviewing all scheduled 'removal missions,' " or deportations, said Karen Kraushaar, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now a part of the Department of Homeland Security. She said flights to areas of conflict or where there were State Department advisories against travel had been and would be canceled.

Israel's plan to deport nine Palestinians involved in riots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a mistake. These deportations won't end the unrest. They violate international law. And they underline anew the futility - and danger - of trying to resolve a political question by force. Israel has used the deportation tactic before. Since 1967, the Israelis have expelled about 1,200 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, according to a detailed study by Ann Lesch, now a Villanova University Professor.

In addition to the points brought out in the Nov. 2 Inquirer Magazine article by Dick Polman, there are other issues involved in the deportation of Karl Linnas. The United States does not recognize the Soviet Union's annexation of Estonia. In cases of deportation, an individual is usually returned to his original country, yet governmentally Estonia does not exist. Thus, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) would send Karl Linnas not to the nation whence he came, but to the country that announced his conviction and death sentence before his trial was held.

A Latvian emigre, facing deportation to the Soviet Union on charges that he committed Nazi atrocities in Latvia, has secretly left his Long Island home and is believed to be in West Germany, government sources said yesterday. Boleslavs Maikovskis, 84, who has lived in Mineola, N.Y., since 1951, was chief of a Nazi-created police force in Latvia during World War II. He was ordered deported in 1984 after he admitted to the Justice Department that men acting on his orders had arrested the residents of a Latvian village and then burned the town.

CARRYING signs that blared "Stop Unjust Deportation," more than 200 immigrant-rights advocates took to the streets yesterday to rally against what they see as civil-rights injustices. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, they marched to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, at 16th and Callowhill streets, raising their voices for Chally Dang, for Mout Iv, for Davy Phean, for Vanney Van. The four Cambodian immigrants sit in York County Prison, detained by ICE. They had been welcomed into this country as refugees and became legal permanent residents.

The New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday overturned the conviction of a legal U.S. immigrant deported from Camden to the Dominican Republic after he admitted that he repeatedly sexually assaulted his teenage neighbor. Attorneys successfully argued that Jose Nunez-Valdez had not been properly warned that by pleading guilty in 1998, he faced deportation. The judges tossed out the plea, and the case of Nunez-Valdez, who was deported in 2002, may now go to trial. "This is a big case," said Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office.

In an attempt to silence him, Gov. McGreevey threatened to make Golan Cipel unemployable and therefore subject to deportation, according to the lawyer drafting a possible sexual-harassment suit against the governor. The governor's lawyer said the allegations are false. In an interview, New York lawyer Rachel Yosevitz contended that a visa threat against the Israeli national was part of a pattern of intimidation and "power play" that began fully two years ago. McGreevey's advisers have maintained that the conflict with Cipel surfaced only last month.

Two months after drawing fire with its decision to forcibly relocate family members of Palestinian suicide bombers, Israel is roiling anew over issues of deportation and denial of citizenship for Israeli Arabs accused of involvement in terrorist attacks. "If we are bleeding hearts and say we don't have the right to protect ourselves, we are committing suicide," Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai said a week ago at a tempestuous meeting of the parliament's Interior Affairs Committee, at which he defended his decision to use his powers to revoke the citizenship of Arab Israelis who work against the Jewish state.

The disease likely to put 8-year-old Mohamed Ali Fathi in a wheelchair by his teens and end his life by 25 is in an early stage. When he runs, he falters. When he climbs stairs, he must press his palms against his thighs for extra lift. Doctors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia diagnosed him last year with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease in which muscles progressively weaken. They say Mohamed is a potential candidate for forthcoming trials of an experimental treatment.