Deportation

Ask around in this Susquehanna River-side town about Dr. Pedro Servano and his wife, Salvacion, Filipino immigrants with deep roots here, and effusive praise rains down. The same is true in neighboring Selinsgrove, where the couple lives, and Hummel's Wharf, where Servano, a family physician, has a 2,000-patient practice. Factor in their four well-educated, U.S.-born, accomplished children, ages 13 to 24, and you have a family portrait that would make Norman Rockwell proud.

One night in the summer of '42, a Jewish boy living in the Warsaw Ghetto sneaked over the ghetto's high brick wall with a coin in his pocket to buy food. His name was Izaak, and he was his family's sole source of regular sustenance. His practice was to buy two - two loaves of bread, two sacks of potatoes, two of whatever he could obtain from Polish merchants on the free side of the wall. He'd keep one, sell one in the ghetto, and make enough profit to buy food again the next night.

It has been three years since Dennis Raji came to the United States from Nigeria. But when the former Lagos businessman heard a federal court jury acquit him of assault yesterday, he found it impossible to suppress 32 years of culture and Islamic training. To the astonishment of 12 jurors and U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell, Raji let out a cry of delight, clapped his hands, and then dropped face down to the courtroom floor, prostrating himself in thanks. "Please, ask him to get up," said Dalzell, smiling, to Raji's lawyers.

John McNicholl stepped out of his Upper Darby house at 5:30 a.m. on July 17 to drive to his union job as a sprinkler fitter, as he had been doing for years. But on this day, he was seized by four federal agents, taken into detention, and within hours was put on a plane to Ireland. He's unlikely to ever see Upper Darby again. Labeled a member of an Irish terrorist organization by the Department of Justice, McNicholl had been in this country - illegally, but trying to obtain citizenship - raising a family for almost 20 years.

Charlie Jaramillo can't forget July 19, 1996. On that day, two immigration agents interrupted the West Chester building contractor's U.S. citizenship interview in Philadelphia and ordered him to spread his hands against a wall. Then they snapped handcuffs on Jaramillo and told him that he was being deported to his native Colombia, a country he left when he was a baby. The reason: a $40 cocaine sale Jaramillo made eight years ago, and for which he did 200 hours of community service and served five years of probation.

Jockey Stewart Elliott attended a hearing yesterday at the Newark, N.J., office of the U.S. Immigration Court concerning his status as a legal alien. Elliott, 40, who rode Smarty Jones to victories in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes last year, is a Canadian citizen. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in 2001 and faces possible deportation under the 1996 Immigration and Naturalization Act, under which an alien convicted of a felony may be denied entry to the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for deportation proceedings to begin against Jonas Stelmokas, the 80-year-old Lansdowne man who was stripped of his U.S. citizenship because of his alleged role in the massacre of Lithuanian Jews during World War II. But Stelmokas has months of appeals ahead of him and is not likely to be expelled just yet, the head of the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit said yesterday. "We should not expect to see him packing his bags this week, unless it's voluntary," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations in Washington, whose efforts have brought about the deportation of 48 accused Nazi criminals since the office was established in 1979.

Mout Iv owns a barbershop in Olney. Chally Dang repairs copiers and fax machines. Hak Ouk works at a packaging company. The U.S. government brought them to Philadelphia as refugees from Cambodia's killing fields. Now, two decades or more later, the U.S. government is threatening to deport them back - for what they did, and didn't do, here in America. For Mout and Chally, both of whom arrived in the United States as children, Cambodia is a land they scarcely know or understand.

America has always prided itself as "a nation of laws, not men," where the rules that bind society matter more than a person's title, economic standing, or who knows whom. What recourse is there, then, when the scales of justice seem out of whack? Should another test of what is right and fair apply? Should the system make exceptions for specific people in cases that an outraged public considers egregious? Attorneys for Pedro and Salvacion Servano, Filipino immigrants facing imminent deportation, think it should.

Saying that she wanted Phillip Anthony Francis imprisoned "for a long time" for selling drugs to children and shooting an undercover narcotics officer, a Common Pleas Court judge yesterday sentenced him to 31 1/2 to 80 years in prison. "When Mr. Francis is considered for release, since I may not be on the bench at that point, I'm going to order that he be released only to the custody of federal officials for deportation and prosecution for violation of immigration laws," Judge Pamela Pryor Cohen said.