WADSWORTH MAN RETURNS TO BRAZIL

DEPORTEE JOAO HERBERT ARRIVES AFTER LITTLE SLEEP, A STRANGER TO THE COUNTRY FROM WHICH HE WAS ADOPTED AS AN 8-YEAR-OLD. AGENCY TO HELP HIM ADJUST

Kevin G. Hall

Akron Beacon Journal

Journal staff writer Marilyn Miller contributed to this report.

Bleary-eyed and emotionally drained, Joao Herbert returned late yesterday to the country of his birth, a country he no longer knows.

Herbert, 22, adopted by a Wadsworth couple in 1986, was deported yesterday to Brazil under controversial provisions of U.S. immigration law that mandate deportation for noncitizen immigrants convicted of drug crimes.

He arrived at 7:05 p.m. EST, in a gray shirt and jeans, glasses and goatee, handcuffs off for good behavior, and in a very brief statement thanked Brazilians for their support. "I never expected all of this," he said.

Asked if he had a message for his adoptive parents, Nancy Saunders and Jim Herbert, Joao Herbert choked and looked like he'd been punched. He told about two dozen reporters that he'd been up for 22 hours and appealed for privacy. They pursued him anyway, his eyes wide with horror, into an overcrowded elevator.

Herbert was arrested in 1997, then 18, for selling a police officer 7.5 ounces of marijuana. His adoptive parents failed to naturalize him for a decade. He was in the process of applying for citizenship when arrested on the drug charge.

Fed up with a deportation process that had kept him jailed for 28 months, Herbert gave up on resolution of his case and asked Brazil for a passport.

The Herbert case is likely to reverberate throughout the United States and Latin America. It is a sad tale of well-meaning laws, inflexible regulators and an Ohio governor who rejected the unanimous decision of his parole board to grant clemency and avoid deportation for a first-time offender convicted of a minor crime.

Herbert returns to bleakness. He no longer remembers Portuguese. He was orphaned as an infant, has no one to call family.

A fan of the Cleveland Browns, he will now learn about Brazilian football - the kind they play with their feet, soccer. He is as lost in Sao Paulo now as the 8-year-old boy he was when he left Brazil's crime-ridden industrial capital in 1986.

"I think everything will be hard for him," said Isabel del Pozo, whose charity organization Arsenal da Esperanca (Hope Arsenal) in Sao Paulo has agreed to take in Herbert and try to help him readjust to life in a developing nation that has few of the comforts of middle-class America.

The agency will spend the next six months trying to help Herbert learn the Portuguese language and will help him find a job.

He will not be alone in hardship, say his hosts, who work with homeless Brazilian men and provide a home as well to about 20 African war refugees from Angola and Mozambique.

He could risk imprisonment if he returns to the United States.

There is a bit of irony that Herbert's new life will be spent with Africans. The man who could have spared him this fate, Republican Gov. Bob Taft, great grandson of 27th U.S. President William Howard Taft, was a Peace Corps teacher in the African nation of Tanzania. Taft has been criticized for ignoring the July clemency recommendation of his parole board.

Taft's office did not return repeated requests yesterday for comment. But, when he rejected the clemency appeal in late August he called Herbert a drug trafficker - despite the minimal amount of possession - and said the young man who has been jailed for deportation since March had shown no remorse.

Herbert's family paints a different picture, saying their adopted son is a distraught young man who now regrets having fallen in with the wrong crowd.

Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said yesterday 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.

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. That doesn't help Herbert either.

Brazilian Ambassador Rubens Barbosa said Herbert became a high profile case after his ordeal created a huge interest in Brazil.

"It was such an odd case," said Barbosa, who said he was shaken by the situation. "This is the first case of deportation of an adoptee."

In Brazil, when you are adopted by foreign parents you are considered a citizen of your parents' country.

"The United States is the only country that doesn't allow for automatic citizenship after adoption," Barbosa said.