America's Harsh and Unjust IMMIGRATION LAWS.

• Author: PAUL, WILLIAM G.

Thousands of individuals have become entrapped by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act with no chance of appeal.

LIKE ALICE following the white rabbit, thousands of immigrants to the U.S. are trapped in the confusing and all-powerful legal net of recently enacted harsh laws, which the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is required to administer. These Federal statutes do not comport with due process standards or the fundamental fairness inherent in the American justice system that protect our citizens. Clearly, there is a double standard for immigrants.

For example, about the time the controversy over Elian Gonzalez--the six-year-old boy plucked from the coastal waters off Florida after an escape attempt from Cuba took the lives of his mother and several others--first reached fever pitch, a young Chinese girl, captured while trying to enter the U.S. after she fled her homeland, appeared at a review heating. She was unable to understand English and terribly frightened, and, as tears rolled uncontrollably down her cheeks, she could not wipe them away because her arms were chained to her waist. She must have been in terror, having fled oppression only to be jailed and hauled in chains before strangers, where she understood nothing. She faces deportation.

Moreover, consider the compelling stories of two mothers also subject to deportation. The first is a young German woman who was adopted and brought to Georgia. Now the mother of two, she recently applied for citizenship. Instead, she was ordered deported because, as a teenager, she had entered a guilty plea to charges stemming from pulling the hair of another girl over the affections of a boy.

The second, a young mother in Falls Church, Va., faces deportation and separation from her children because she called the police after being brutally beaten by her husband. Instead of coming to her defense, police arrested her because she bit her husband as he sat on her and repeatedly hit her. Incredibly, both mothers face deportation, while their children--all born here--can remain.

How can a hair-pulling or biting incident be grounds for deportation? Equally important, how has the U.S. become a country that tears apart families or denies due process to those trying to obtain freedom, safety, and prosperity for themselves and their families?

Answers to both questions are in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Adopted in 1996, these tough laws are at the crux of the problem. They have changed the legal rules for newcomers, making them subject to harsher penalties for infractions than are citizens.

These laws reclassify past infractions retroactively so that they become deportable offenses, even in cases when no prison time was ordered or where there is evidence of rehabilitation. They have widely expanded the definition of aggravated felony to include minor crimes. Noncitizens convicted of aggravated felonies are now not only deportable, but ineligible for a waiver from deportation or for judicial review.

IIRAIRA undermines one of the principles underlying the Constitution--the...