Free Republic

The president of the MEChA club at Palomar College has been deported to Mexico, immigration officials said yesterday. Paola Oropeza, 22, was arrested Jan. 8 by a fugitive operations team with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for the department in San Diego. Oropeza had been ordered to leave the country by an immigration judge, but she failed to comply with that order, Mack said. At the time of her arrest, Oropeza was in the country illegally and was taken to Tijuana, Mack said. Oropeza did not have a criminal record, said Mack, who could not...

FORT WORTH - Dressed in tan fatigues and white undershirts, 20 seventh-graders from William James Middle School solemnly filed into a juvenile courtroom Friday as their confused and weeping parents passed around a box of tissue. The eight girls and 12 boys had been held overnight in juvenile detention after a Fort Worth police officer assigned to the school said she saw the group "jump" a 13-year-old girl in the schoolyard Thursday in what appeared to be a gang initiation. The students, their parents and the youngster described as the victim maintain that the group was just "playing around." Many...