‘Mommy’s not an alien anymore. I’m finally one of you guys.’

When Eleanor Franco Gonzalez Parnes rose from her seat and, along with 3,000 other immigrants, pledged her loyalty to the United States last week, it was as if “something lifted out of my chest and flew away.”

“Finally,” she said, “I feel I don’t have to look over my shoulder anymore. Nobody can separate me from my family.”

For more than three years, Parnes, now 32, said she has lived with fear and uncertainty, wrought by her arrest and deportation to the Philippines in 1984.

“I was married to an American; I was pregnant with his child. Then suddenly, after 12 years here, I was back in Philippines, with nothing,” she recalled. “It was a horrible thing to go through.

“For three years, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Now, for the first time since then, I feel free.”

Parnes had come to this country legally in 1972 as a housekeeper for the former Philippine consul general. She became an illegal alien two years later when she left that job, and, in 1980, she was ordered deported.

She failed to leave the country though--contending later that she thought the order had been successfully appealed. She found work as a medical assistant, and in 1982 she married an American, Richard Parnes.

It was Richard Parnes’ request in 1984 that she be given permanent residency that alerted the Immigration and Naturalization Service to her whereabouts and led to her arrest as a fugitive from a deportation order.

Five months pregnant, she was held in an INS detention center for 10 days, then, in November, 1984, she was put on a late-night plane to the Philippines, without even a chance to tell her husband goodby.

INS Officials Relent

The deportation generated media attention and stirred widespread controversy. Immigration officials relented two weeks later and waived a five-year waiting period, allowing Eleanor Parnes to return immediately to the United States.

She came back in December, 1984, with the help of an airline that reduced her fare and donations from sympathetic strangers who had heard of her plight. Four months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, an American citizen named David Jason Parnes.

The family is still in touch with some of the people they met during her odyssey--the Iranian who befriended her in the detention center and was later deported, the man who gave her $20 on the plane back to the Philippines because she had no money, the woman who donated $1,000 to pay for her air fare back and has become an “adopted grandma” to young David.

Their lives in the last three years have been filled with the most typical of American pursuits. They love baseball games and picnics, and visits to Richard Parnes’ family in New York. They bought a home on a quiet Van Nuys street last year, and their second child, Joshua, was born 2 1/2 months ago.

On Wednesday, both Joshua and David slept through the citizenship ceremony that meant so much to their mother and father.

“But I think David knows what it means,” Eleanor Parnes said later. “We’ve told him what happened, and shown him the tapes (from television news accounts) and news stories. When we left (the ceremony) Wednesday, he said, ‘Mommy, you’re not an Alf anymore.’ He knows Alf is an alien.

“I told him ‘That’s right. Mommy’s not an alien anymore. I’m finally one of you guys.’ ”