In deporting an undocumented migrant, the U.S. wants to keep most of his life savings, too.

After nine years of washing dishes, Pedro Zapeta managed to save $62,000. Then he lost most of it overnight. Not to addiction or street thugs. To the U.S. government.

Customs agents confiscated $59,000 of Zapeta's money when he tried to board a plane home to Guatemala (he had another $3,000 in his pockets) in 2005. It's not illegal to take that much money out of the country. But it's illegal not to report it on a special form. Zapeta didn't know that. He's not a frequent flyer.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Cohn levied a heavy civil penalty for Zapeta's mistake: $49,000. Zapeta was graciously allowed to keep the remainder of his earnings. Then he was kicked out. He has until January to leave the country.

Exhausted and bewildered, Zapeta wants to go -- but not without his money, which everyone agrees he acquired through honest labor.

''You can imagine the great effort it took me to earn that money and when they took it, it caused me a great sadness,'' Zapeta told me in Spanish. ``But I know there is a God who is great and good, and I know he is looking down and will help me.''

Zapeta's story, initially reported by the Palm Beach Post, exploded after CNN recently ran a segment on him. By this week, dozens of bloggers were weighing in from Omaha to Denmark.

Reaction ranged from the sentimental to the outright vicious. That's because a simple story of outrage is muddied by the circumstances of Zapeta's arrival in the United States: In 1996, Zapeta admits, he entered the country illegally through the Texas frontier. Later, he bought a fake Social Security number for $25.

HARD WORKER

He spent the next decade working -- sometimes 13 hours a day -- scrubbing dishes and pots in Stuart restaurants. He never filed an income tax return, but some of his pay stubs show that his employers took taxes from his wages, says his attorney, Robert Gershman. Zapeta rode his bike to work and lived quietly. He labored hard at tedious work and earned his pay.

None of that satisfies the few embittered nativists who (lacking imagination as well as heart) have copied the same screed from site to site: ``Deport Pedro Zapeta Sans $59,000.''