What is it like to be deported?

El Tiempo narrates the deportation of a Colombian who had lived in Miami for seven years. But it's just a straight chronicle of events, names changed, no analysis, just the one statistic indicating at least 1,742 Colombian deportees last year and nearly 190,000 total deportations (some completed from previous pending cases) to all countries last year in America.

En la tarde, dos agentes lo acompañaron hasta la silla de un avión de Avianca y antes de despegar le entregaron su pasaporte con el sello: 'Deportado'. Llegó al Eldorado y en inmigración del DAS le preguntaron qué había pasado y él contó su historia. Entonces, el agente le puso el sello de ingreso y le dijo: "Bienvenido a su país".

That afternoon, two agents accompanied him to his seat on an Avianca flight, and before take-off, gave him his passport stamped "Deported." He arrived at Eldorado airport and at the immigration counter was asked what had happened. He told his story. Then, the agent stamped his entry and said, "Welcome to your country."

As an experiment in empathy, an interesting story-telling approach. El Tiempo's comment page lit up with approval for finally telling it from the deportee's perspective, and other, similar stories started pouring in. Commenters discuss just how hard it is to get set up here, whether it's worth it, who to avoid (lawyers, mostly). There's an interestingly skewed view of fairness in all this, worth checking out.

Adopt, deport: how did I end up here?

A follow-up on those 1500 Cambodians who were deported, in what immigration observers agreed was a bizarre and tragic case of systems failure: Cambodia was deemed recovered enough to handle its own criminals. In a series of three-strikes-you're-out type rulings against immigrants who had never bothered (or been unable to) take U.S. citizenship, judges across Cambodian enclaves in the U.S. were all of a sudden ordering exile for people --most, former refugees-- with 20-year histories in America. As many of the initial reports mentioned, none of the deportees were saints, but many articles questioned the idea of sending people back to a country they barely knew as a remedy for social maladjustments here. (See an overview, an early report.)

A report this week in the Seattle Times finds one of the deportees two and a half years later, in a "remote village" where his distant relatives had taken him in. It's one of many reports covering the wake of a blinkered policy.

I had seen the deportees starting to arrive in Phnom Penh in 2002. Many of them landed at a the home of Bill Herod, who ran an impromptu shelter originally called RAP, or Return Assistance Project. That has since evolved into RISP, the Return Integration Support Program, funded by Vietnam Vets and US AID. Their website is worth exploring: it's a phenomenal record of displacement and fate. They have archived the extensive press coverage.

RISP offers a survival guide, but each deportee assumes his fate differently. In the photo gallery:

several returnees have become monks