Popular Professor Won’t Be Deported

A popular Paraguayan-born music professor at Irvine Valley College who had been ordered to leave the United States by next week won a reprieve Monday when the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted his request for humanitarian parole.

Daniel Luzko, 33, will be allowed to remain in the United States and reapply for a green card.

Luzko, an Aliso Viejo resident who joined IVC’s faculty last fall from Washington, D.C., has been in the United States 11 years. He was ordered to leave after he mistakenly used an expired visa when he traveled to Paraguay in December to accept a $10,000 music award from his native country’s government.

The professor said he wrongly believed the paper was still valid because it had been stamped “Paroled . . . May 8, 2000.” In fact, his permission to travel abroad had expired in October. The date on the stamp referred to his permission to remain in the United States while his application for a green card was pending.

Learning of his plight, dozens of faculty members, students and administrators at IVC wrote letters to the INS on his behalf. Losing the professor after only one semester would be a terrible blow to the music program, which had waited 10 years for the money to fund his position, they argued.

“We’re just starting a new semester. Thinking he wasn’t going to be here to help us through this has been really frustrating,” said first-year music theory student Lou Ann Noren of Irvine, who was among those who wrote to the INS on Luzko’s behalf.

Luzko had been ordered to appear Monday at INS offices in Los Angeles to prove that he had bought an airline ticket to Paraguay. In a tense morning of meetings, an INS inspector at first upheld the deportation order, only to be reversed by his superiors an hour later, said Luzko’s lawyer, James Acoba.

Though he will not be deported, Luzko now must begin his green card application from scratch. His lawyer said the INS backlog in processing such applications is now about 27 months.

Luzko said he had been living in limbo since the deportation order came down. On Monday, finally able to relax, he credited his colleagues and students with the success of his appeal.

“The main thing that allowed me to get humanitarian parole was the support of the people. [The INS] didn’t make a distinction on anything but the needs of my work and how many people were going to be affected,” Luzko said.

He said he is not eager to repeat the application process, “but at least I got something that will allow me to continue my work.”