Arlan found a stable job working for a construction company. Noriko grew up Japanese, attending school and never learning her parents’ native language. Noriko, like many Tokyo girls her age, loves hip-hop and hopes to be a dancer or a teacher at a dance school someday. But her future in the only country she’s ever known went into limbo when Japanese immigration authorities arrested her mother in 2006.
Japan’s Immigration Bureau in a statement to CNN said the couple’s illegal presence in the country as an “extremely malicious” violation that “shakes the foundation of Japan’s immigration control.” But when it came to 13 year old Noriko, the government gave the girl a choice: Her country or her parents. “Japan is my homeland,” says Noriko, when asked why she is choosing to stay behind. She will move in with an aunt, allowed to stay in Japan under a visa that the government will reassess yearly. Her life, say her parents, will be better in Japan. She’ll have schooling and the dreams a big city like Tokyo can offer her, versus the impoverished farm community her parents will move back to in the Philippines.

However heart-breaking the story, this is not a story that happens rarely. Such scenes are repeated in Japan and many other countries on a regular basis. Some countries are more liberal, allowing people to see a path for becoming citizens when they have been in the country for a long time; in other cases, it is equally traumatic when the child gets automatic citizenship due to having been born there, while the parents get no such benefit and are deported back to their original countries.
One slight twist happens in some such cases when the families do not retain any papers of their original country’s citizenship, and their original country refuses to take them, asking for proof that these people were indeed their citizens in the first place.

However, now the state is going to file a petition in the Texas Supreme Court asking for this decision to be over-turned:

Texas authorities asked the state Supreme Court on Friday to overturn a ruling that found child welfare officials had no right to take more than 400 children from a gated polygamist compound. Lawyers for the Department of Family and Protective Services also requested that the high court allow the state to keep the children in foster homes until their fate is decided. Otherwise, they said, Texas would be forced within days to return more than 120 boys and girls to sect members who have not proved they are the biological parents.
Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch in West Texas on April 3, after a caller claimed she was a 16-year-old bride suffering abuse at the hands of her husband, a call that since has been shown to probably be a hoax. Inside the secluded compound, child welfare officials have said, they found numerous pregnant teenagers and child brides living in a communal setting with older men, bound in “spiritual marriages.”

No matter what happens, this is likely to remain controversial. It is pretty much known that the Church’s compound had a continuing practise of polygamy (which remains illegal), and in earlier depositions, women who have escaped from the Church have claimed that they have been forced into marriage and sex.