JOAO HERBERT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN DEPORTED

Akron Beacon Journal

May 28, 2004

Joao Herbert's short life proved a sad mix of opportunity, youthful errors and bad laws.

Herbert was 8 years old when he was adopted from a Brazilian orphanage by a Wadsworth couple, Jim Herbert and Nancy Saunders. At 18, he got into trouble with the law and was convicted, along with two friends, of selling 7.5 ounces of marijuana to an undercover agent. He was put on probation and ordered into drug treatment.

The punishment might have turned him around, and his problems with the law might have ended there. But the Wadsworth teen-ager was not an American citizen, and that made all the difference.

He had turned 18 before his citizenship papers were complete. His conviction in 1997 made him a candidate for deportation under the 1996 immigration law. Herbert skipped out of drug treatment to Florida, was arrested when he returned to Ohio and slated for deportation to Brazil.

Herbert grew up in Wadsworth, did not speak Portuguese and knew no one in Brazil. His crime was a minor offense. The Ohio Parole Board recommended clemency. None of that swayed the Immigration and Naturalization Service or Gov. Bob Taft.

In 2000, Herbert, then 22, was deported.

It appeared Brazilians welcomed the young man kicked out of America on a marijuana offense. He found a mentor in an Ohio missionary family from Stow that helped him make a start and eventually earn his living teaching English. He had opened a school. He did not seem to have missed the opportunities he found to rebuild his life under circumstances both unfamiliar and challenging.

Joao Herbert's body was found Tuesday on a street in Campinas, where he lived. He had been shot several times. He was 26 years old.

The reason and the circumstances of his death are as yet unclear. What is clear is that his place was here in the United States with his family. The law that mandated automatic deportation and denied noncitizens a right to appeal in court was utterly unfair and has since been amended. A new law also grants automatic citizenship to adopted foreign children.

Herbert's death is a sad end to harsh justice.