Deportation

A U.S. soldier who fought in Iraq before deserting faces deportation from Canada by June 12 after his application to remain was rejected. Corey Glass, 25, of Fairmount, Ind., could face jail. He lives in Toronto.

They laughed when Mitt Romney suggested that the solution to illegal immigration was "self-deportation. " Morally obtuse as the Romney approach might be, it may be working. According to an analysis of U.S. and Mexican census data conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, roughly 6.1 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants were living in the United States last year, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007.  According to the Associated Press, "It was the biggest sustained drop in modern history, believed to be surpassed in scale only by losses in the Mexican-born U.S. population during the Great Depression.

Federal authorities have repeatedly said their priority is to find and remove illegal immigrants with violent criminal histories, but the U.S. government's stepped-up enforcement in recent years has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to a new study.

California has so far managed to avoid the mistake made by Alabama, Arizona and other states that have sought to enact local immigration laws even though that is an area that is rightly the responsibility of the federal government. But that may soon change. A bipartisan effort led by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar) and Mike Madrid, a former political director of the state Republican Party, hopes to place the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act, or COPA, on the November ballot.

To U.S. officials, a new pact announced this week with Vietnam, allowing the government to deport illegal immigrants, was almost routine -- a straightforward matter of treating Vietnam like other nations. But for many among the tens of thousands of immigrants in Orange County, the nation's largest Vietnamese population center, nothing about their homeland is routine.

All inmates booked into jails throughout Los Angeles County will have their immigration status checked beginning today, but federal officials said they don't have the resources to deport all illegal immigrants with criminal records who are identified. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will prioritize illegal immigrants with prior convictions for violent crimes, including murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery. Though immigration officials plan to assess every case individually, they said some with less serious criminal records may be released back into the community.

Like many other spouses of undocumented immigrants, Gina Pope constantly worries that her husband suddenly could be deported and that she would be left to raise their two children by herself. Pope, a U.S. citizen, wants to apply for him to get a green card but knows that would mean his traveling to his native Peru, with the risk of not returning for months or years. Now, after more than a decade of waiting for the immigration rules to change, Pope is cautiously optimistic that her husband, who owns a residential construction business and has a temporary work permit, may finally be able to become a legal resident.

Cuba agreed Friday to reinstate an immigration agreement with the United States that will allow the return to Cuba of almost 3,000 common criminals and mentally ill persons who came to the United States among the thousands of refugees in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, the State Department announced.

  Brothers Manuel and Valente Valenzuela still don their dress blue military uniforms with the ramrod-straight posture from their Vietnam War days. Manuel, a former Marine, carried out rescue missions. Valente, an Army soldier, was wounded and received a Bronze Star. The brothers, both in their 60s, are now waging a legal battle against an unexpected foe: the U.S. government. They are trying to stop the country they served from deporting them to Mexico. On Saturday, they took their protest to the U.S.-Mexico border, where they marched in a demonstration that mixed solemn defiance with unabashed patriotism.

In the last few years, the number of illegal immigrants in detention who waived their right to plead their case to remain in the United States has shot up from 5,500 in 2004 to 35,000 this year. In all, nearly 100,000 people have agreed to leave the country under "stipulated removal. " Not surprisingly, troubling reports have surfaced of immigrants who say they were encouraged to self-deport without knowing that they had valid legal claims to remain in the U.S. and to have a hearing before a judge.

Felipe Montes can see no reason why he shouldn't be able to raise his three sons. He has a job and a house to live in. He has no known history of drug abuse. He has no criminal record , save for a mountain of traffic infractions. The problem is that, after seven years of living illegally in North Carolina's Appalachian foothills, where he worked, married and became a father, Felipe was deported to his native Mexico. Soon after, his American-born wife was deemed unfit to raise the children.

The man suspected of killing five people in a San Francisco home Friday was ordered to be deported six years ago, but remained in the United States when his native country of Vietnam refused to cooperate, authorities said Monday. Binh Thai Luc, 35, of San Francisco was arrested Sunday, two days after the bodies of three women and two men were discovered in an Ingleside district home. On Monday, officials revealed that Luc had been taken into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in August 2006 after he completed an eight-year prison sentence for assault and attempted robbery.

Reporting from London -- John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker convicted of serving as a guard at a Nazi extermination camp and being complicit in the deaths of more than 28,000 people, died Saturday in Germany. He was 91. Demjanjuk died in a nursing home in southern Germany as a prisoner of failing health but not of the justice system that found him guilty last year of being an accessory to mass murder. A German judge had sentenced him to five years behind bars, but he was allowed his freedom while he launched an appeal.

Two weeks ago, Uriel Alberto interrupted a state legislative hearing in North Carolina and declared himself an undocumented immigrant. "I am undocumented and I am unafraid," Alberto, 24, told a North Carolina House of Representatives immigration committee in Raleigh . "I refuse to be bullied and intimidated by this committee and choose to empower my community. " Alberto's bold statement got him arrested for disorderly conduct -- and landed him in jail under threat of federal deportation.

A Miami high school valedictorian who gained national attention with her fight to avoid deportation back to Colombia has been granted a two-year reprieve by federal authorities who now say that their bigger goal is going after illegal immigrants who are criminals -- and not dutiful students. Daniela Pelaez, and her sister, Dayana, were ordered to leave the country just last week by a federal immigration judge. But U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday issued a statement saying the agency would defer carrying out the court order for at least two years.

Akio and Fukado Kawashima came to Southern California in 1984 as lawful Japanese immigrants determined to succeed in business. They operated popular sushi restaurants in Thousand Oaks and Tarzana and recently opened a new eatery in Encino. But after they underreported their business income in 1991, they paid a hefty price. The Internal Revenue Service hit them with $245,000 in taxes and penalties. The couple pleaded guilty and paid in full. A decade later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided to deport them.

The Supreme Court has recognized what would be obvious to any layperson: A competent defense attorney must inform a client that a guilty plea might lead not only to prison time but to deportation from the country. The court last week ruled 7 to 2 for Jose Padilla, a legal resident from Honduras who was wrongly told by his lawyer that pleading guilty to a marijuana trafficking charge wouldn't change his immigration status because he'd been in the country for more than 40 years. In an opinion for himself and four colleagues, Justice John Paul Stevens said that "deportation is an integral part -- indeed sometimes the most important part -- of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants who plead guilty to specific crimes."

The Supreme Court will decide whether the government is free to deport illegal immigrants who came to this country as children and whose parents became lawful residents in the United States. The issue before the high court has echoes of last week's debate of Republican presidential contenders, in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry was criticized for his state's policy of giving in-state tuition to students who are illegal immigrants. Perry argued that students who came to Texas through "no fault of their own" should not be denied the benefits of low tuition in the state's colleges.

As he walked into the cafeteria of Walker Butte Elementary School to help recruit local citizens as law enforcement volunteers, the recently outed sheriff of Pinal County got an immensely warm welcome. Men shook his hand. Women embraced and kissed him. Paul Babeu did not seem to be a man whose career and political aspirations were crumbling, as some have claimed. Except for his raggedy voice, he seemed about as comfortable and upbeat as could be expected of a man who had just faced the world to acknowledge publicly for the first time that he was gay, while denying he had threatened his former lover, a Mexican national, with deportation.

The way Omar Sierra remembers it, dozens of day laborers gathered in the Kmart parking lot that day more than 15 years ago. A county mobile health clinic arrived with a mariachi band and free food and offered HIV tests to those waiting for work. Sierra got in line and sat for his test. He heard a commotion, turned and saw men running. He thought someone was offering a job and wondered whether he should go with them. Then he saw the immigration agents. And he ran as fast as he could.