Roger Simmie is no angel.
Twenty years ago, the Mountain View carpenter was convicted of resisting arrest and drug possession. Fifteen years after that, he was found guilty of battering his girlfriend. Three times, he's been convicted of drunken driving.
But it's what he didn't do that got him locked up recently in the Santa Clara County Jail. Simmie, a Scot by birth who fought in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, never applied for U.S. citizenship.
Now he finds himself facing deportation as one of nearly 400,000 immigrants incarcerated this year by the U.S. government. A growing number of noncitizens who have been living in this country as legal permanent residents are learning that run-ins with the law, even minor ones, are translating into life-altering, one-way tickets to homelands they no longer know.
A report last spring from Human Rights Watch found that 1 out of 5 "criminal aliens" deported from 1997 to 2007 had been in the country legally. Many, like Simmie, have known America as home for decades. "I'm living in limbo," said Simmie, 61, whose friends raised thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to fight his deportation.
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