A one-way ticket out of only nation he knows

<Excerpts>

Margaret Philp,

social policy reporter, Toronto Globe and Mail:

"Mario Perez was less cunning thief than punkish teenager looking to

hock stolen goods for cash to buy clothes, alchohol and mariujuana -

and clumsy enought to leave clues behind. He did not know police were

on his trail until they ambushed him in a Brantford, Ont. park after

his string of break-ins. Even less did he suspect that the five months

he would serve in jail on four counts of breaking and entering would

be the least of his worries. A few days before he was sprung, he was

handed a deportation order that would be his one way ticket out of the

only country he knows.

The Immigration Department wants to sent the lanky 19 year old, who

speaks barely a word of Spanish, back to to Mexico, a country where he

knows no one. Branded a serious criminal in Canada, his would appear

to be an open-and-shut case for deportation.

But his story is not so simple , and Canada's move to push him out of

the door is a blow from the country that ushered him in, only to allow

him to be dumped into the child welfare system where he was raised as

a Canadian.

At the age of two Mario was placed in a hard-scrabble Mexican

orphanage with his infant sister by a dirt-poor young mother who has

since died.

A few years later the children were brought to Canada by a would-be

adoptive mother who made little secret of wanting only a girl. Mario

was abandoned to the children's aid society less than two years later.

Raised as a government ward in foster care, he was never granted legal

immigrant status. no one applied on his behalf for permanent residency

or citzenship, and it did not matter while he was a crown ward in Ontario.

But when he became an adult last year and months later was convicted

of the break-ins, his deportation was automatic.

Lawers hired by the Catholic Children's Aid Society in Toronto, where

he was surrendered more than a decade ago, have filed a last-ditch

appeal for him to remain in Canada on compssionate grounds.'

<excerpts>

'Three years after he was abandoned in the orphanage, a Canadian woman

flew to Guadalajara to adopt a beautiful dark-haired four-year-old

girl named Gabriela, only to be told that she could not leave without

the child's five-year-old brother.

She returned to Toronto with both children but she turned Mario over

to the CAS, saying she could no longer manage the impulsive,

aggressive, disturbed eight -year-old boy.

"He was very energetic. He was really quite adorable' , remembers

Louise taylor, a Catholic CAS social worker who has been his

caseworker for most of the past decade. "He had to show me how fast he

could run. That, and getting an ice-cream were his priorities."

The woman Mario considered his mother never returned to visit him

while he was in foster care. She refused to hand over a photograph of

his sister, and ruled out visits to her. After mario cried for his

favourite stuffed pink bunny, she told social workers it was no longer

in her possssion.

Since the day he entered foster care, Mario has yearned to see the

sister who is his only family.

After a child psychologist suggested he should be in contact with his

sister, Mario won the right to see her in a precedent-setting court

battle that allowed access to biological siblings after an adoption.

But the victory was snatched away when the adoptive mother slipped out

of the country with his sister.'

<excerpts>