Deportation

RE YOUR editorial "Dignity and Respect Cornerstones of Immigration Policy": You got it right to advocate offering immigrants a pathway to citizenship and a tightening of enforcement. What won't work is the deportation of 11 million hard-working men and women on whom our economy depends and the criminalization of religious and social workers who address their material and spiritual needs. Congress should address the causes of migration over which the U.S. has influence, like the relationship of NAFTA to the increase of rural unemployment in Mexico.

A federal judge Thursday morning rejected an attempt by a former Delaware County restaurateur known for his family's frequent brushes with the law to withdraw his guilty plea on weapons, tax, and immigration charges. Sean O'Neill, who with his wife owned Maggie O'Neill's Irish Pub & Restaurant in Drexel Hill until selling it in 2006, argued that a guilty plea he made in 2009 was coerced by his then-attorneys, who he said warned him that his wife would be arrested on tax-fraud charges if he did not admit to the crimes.

In Ronald Reagan's America this week, a man protesting his innocence was forcibly loaded on an East European passenger jet and sent off to the Soviet Union to face almost-certain death at the hands of a judicial system no one could claim is impartial. Bad as that sounds, it was the fairest way to resolve the case of Karl Linnas. Linnas, 67, was no ordinary criminal. Indeed, the only crime he committed during his 36 years of residence in this country was lying on his immigration application.

Thomas S. Vile, who for more than seven months thwarted efforts to deport him from Canada to face trial in the slaying of his former girlfriend in Delaware County, has been returned to the United States. At 7:30 p.m. Monday, three hours after an administrative judge in Toronto ordered Vile deported, he was turned over to a U.S. marshal and Buffalo police at the Peace Bridge, the span that connects Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo. Delaware County District Attorney William H. Ryan Jr., who announced the deportation yesterday, said it might take six to eight weeks to have Vile extradited to Pennyslvania.

ATTORNEY GENERAL John Ashcroft is making sense. He's ordered the deportation of a Haitian nanny convicted of second-degree manslaughter in the beating death of a 19-month-old boy in 1995. Ashcroft's decision reverses a bleeding-heart ruling by three Janet Reno-appointed members of the obscure Board of Immigration Appeals. "Aliens arriving at our shores must understand that residency in the United States is a privilege, not a right," Ashcroft wrote. "For those aliens . . . who engage in violent criminal acts . . . this country will not offer its embrace.

NEW YORK COUPLE TO ORBIT IN MOST MILKY WAY Rick and Karen Dobbertin plan to travel around the world, a sane enough adventure. But the mode of transportation they've selected, a floating milk truck, is almost loony enough to have them committed. The New York couple spent five years converting a stainless-steel, 1959 milk tanker into an amphibious vehicle capable of taking them over land and sea in one continuous trip around the world. They call their vehicle, which looks like something NASA built, the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter.

Immigration authorities are about to give the hook to a former British sex- scandal figure who police say was running an escort service from an untidy apartment on Conshohocken Avenue near Monument Road in Philadelphia. Mary Oris - also known as Elizabeth Geiger, Angela Geiger, Shara Fields, Norma Levy and about 15 other aliases - was arrested at the apartment yesterday on a federal deportation warrant. She is in jail in Salem County, N.J., awaiting deportation to her native Ireland on Tuesday.

FBI tries to catch 'Granddad Bandit' ST. LOUIS - A bald, heavyset man who has robbed 21 banks in the eastern and central United States since January 2009 is proving so elusive that the FBI has given him a name - the "Granddad Bandit" - and it announced plans Tuesday to post a digital picture of him on billboards in several states in hopes of catching him. The man, believed to be 50 to 60 years old, is suspected in 21 bank robberies in 12 states,...

Convicted Nazi war criminal George Theodorovich, a retired meat-packer living in Torresdale, has been ordered to leave the United States for Argentina or face mandatory deportation to the Soviet Union. "Theodorovich . . . did more than assist in the persecution (of Jews), he was the persecutor," U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Judge John F. Gossard Jr. wrote in a 154-page ruling released yesterday. In his role as a Ukrainian occupational policeman, Theodorovich helped the Nazis ship Jews from the western Ukraine city of Lvov to the Belzec death camp.

PHILADELPHIA He's guilty of 2 heists After a weeklong trial, John Gassew, 25, of Frankford, was found guilty by a federal jury yesterday of two gunpoint robberies in December 2007 and October 2009. Authorities said that Gassew robbed Danny Boy's Bar, on Torresdale Avenue in Holmesburg, threatening employees and patrons with a gun Dec. 9, 2007. On Oct. 28, 2009, Gassew robbed a convenience store on Oxford Avenue in Fox Chase, stealing almost $5,000 worth of cigarettes and $140 in cash.