But the doctor, who has tended to patients here in the Susquehanna Valley for more than a decade, is instead battling a deportation order along with his wife.

The Servanos are among a growing group of legal immigrants who reach for the prize and permanence of citizenship, only to run afoul of highly technical immigration statutes that carry the severe penalty of expulsion from the country. For the Servanos, the problem has been a legal hitch involving their marital status when they came from the Philippines some 25 years ago.

Largely overlooked in the charged debate over illegal immigration, many of these are long-term legal immigrants in the United States who were confident of success when they applied for naturalization, and would have continued to live here legally had they not sought to become citizens.

As applications for naturalization have surged, overburdened federal examiners, under pressure to make quick decisions and also weed out any security risks, prefer to err on the side of rejection, immigration lawyers and independent researchers said. In 2007, 89,683 applications for naturalization were denied, about 12 percent of those presented.

In the last 12 years, denial rates have been consistently higher than at any time since the 1920s.

Immigration agents systematically entered homes and made arrests without proper warrants during raids to round up immigration fugitives in New Jersey, according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday.

The lawsuit, brought by lawyers at the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, will provide a constitutional test of law enforcement methods often used by immigration agents since May 2006 when they began operations across the country to track down and deport immigrants who had been ordered to leave by the courts.

The suit, against officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on behalf of 10 plaintiffs, including two United States citizens, contends that teams of ICE agents used "deceit or, in some cases, raw force" to gain "unlawful entry."

...

One plaintiff in the lawsuit, Maria Argueta, has been a legal immigrant since 2001. During a predawn operation in January at her home in North Bergen, N.J., the lawsuit claims, ICE agents persuaded Ms. Argueta to open her door by telling her they were police officers searching for a wanted criminal. Ms. Argueta was detained and held for 36 hours.

Another plaintiff, Arturo Flores, a United States citizen, said ICE agents showed no warrant when they forced their way into his house in Clifton, N.J., in November 2006 and conducted a search. A third plaintiff, Veronica Covias, a legal immigrant in Paterson, N.J., said agents pushed open her door in March 2007 even though she demanded that they show her a warrant.

A Mexican citizen who filed a federal lawsuit against Park County for medical neglect during a 2003 detention in the county jail has reached a $1.5 million settlement, his lawyers announced Monday.

Park County's insurers will pay Moises Carranza-Reyes for injuries and illnesses he suffered while he was detained.

Carranza-Reyes was placed in the jail on immigration violations.

While in custody, he lost a lung and part of his left leg after developing a streptococcus infection.

Exactly one year ago today, immigration officials rounded up 361 people, many of them from Central America, during a raid of a Michael Bianco leather-goods factory in New Bedford, Mass.

Families were separated, single mothers were taken off to jail, and at least one infant who was accustomed to nursing from his mother had to be taken to a hospital while the mother was being detained. A federal court eventually faulted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's handling of the incident, saying it failed to properly notify social-welfare agencies before the raid and later denied caseworkers access to detainees.

...

In an editorial in a local Massachusetts publication today, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts argues that a repeat of the New Bedford incident occurred in California just last month. In that incident, immigration officials raided a printer supply company in Van Nuys. Mr. Kerry, in his editorial, said that workers were rounded up and handcuffed and then denied access to families and attorneys.

"Most shockingly, given the lessons of New Bedford, workers who attempted to call family members and arrange for child care claim that agents prevented them from doing so," he wrote.

Lyglenson Lemorin, age 33, came to the U.S. from Haiti as a child. He is a legal resident of the U.S. He hasn't been to Haiti in 20 years.

He was acquitted by a federal jury of any wrongdoing in the Justice Department's hyped prosecution of the Miami Liberty 7 -- another case that went after a bunch of sad sacks who may have been bumbling terror wannabes but had no ability to carry out a terror threat even if that was their desire.

The Justice Department is now trying to deport Lemorin back to Haiti -- for the same conduct for which he was acquitted. In other words, a legal resident who grew up here and was acquitted by a jury after the Government had its chance to take its best shot and failed is now facing removal from the United States. He never even saw a day of freedom after the acquittal.

A Duke University study published this year found that foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four American technology start-up companies from 1995 to 2005 and generated 450,000 domestic jobs in 2005.

Among the technology companies founded by foreign entrepreneurs are Sun Microsystems Inc., Intel Corp and Google Inc.

The study pointed out the contributions foreign entrepreneurs make to the American economy. It found that 25 percent of the companies founded in those 10 years had at least one senior executive — a founder, chief executive, president or chief technology officer — who was born outside the United States. The study was based on telephone surveys of 2,054 companies. In 2005 immigrant entrepreneurs’ companies generated $52 billion in sales.

Those "lazy immigrants" are really creating jobs, stimulating the economy and pushing the technological envelope.