Border Bungle

A boy is mistakenly deported

When a team of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents roared into a grocery-store parking lot in Santa Ana, Calif., dozens of Mexican workers scattered, but Mario Moreno-Lopez just stood there. "Run! Run!" shouted a friend. "No," said Mario. "I have papers." Mario, who is 14 but looks much older, does have a green card showing that he is in the U.S. legally. But his father Juan Moreno-Garcia, who was granted U.S. residency rights in 1981, was holding the card for safekeeping. As a result, father and son both became victims of a classic bureaucratic bungle.

Mario and other Mexicans were ordered into a bus by the INS agents and taken to a detention center in Los Angeles, 30 miles from Santa Ana. Mario was shown a form, written in Spanish, telling him he had a right to get an attorney. Mario, who did not know an attorney, said he did not understand the form. He was told he could talk to officials at the Mexican consulate. Mario assumed that it was in Mexico. The agents kept asking him and the others to sign a paper waiving their right to oppose deportation. "They threw one man on the floor and against a wall," Mario says. "After that, everybody started signing." So did Mario.

Mario was then taken with others in an INS bus to the border at Tijuana. He met another young deportee, who had $10, and the two used it for food. After a day of wandering, they crawled into the U.S. through a hole in the border fence. INS agents caught them, detained them overnight and deported them again. They sneaked back into the U.S. An elderly friend of the other youth let them sleep in his backyard in San Diego. Mario's father, meanwhile, borrowed $60 from friends, took a bus to the border and spent four days showing pictures of his son to people in the streets of Tijuana. Finally, a San Diego couple' who had seen Mario's photo on TV saw him near the waterfront and took him to the San Diego police station. His ordeal was over.

Top INS officials began an investigation into whether their agents had violated agency and court orders on handling minors. Last week a federal judge temporarily halted all deportations of unaccompanied minors, filling detention centers with some 200 youngsters. Juan Moreno-Garcia said he had learned one thing from the painful experience: "From now on, I will let Mario carry his own papers." Mario's lesson was different.

A truant officer in Santa Ana told him that until he is 16 he must attend school rather than work full time. qed