EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) - Mexican officials Friday protested the recent
                  arrests and planned deportation from the United States of hundreds of legal
                  immigrants convicted on three or more charges of drunk driving.

                  Armando Ortiz Ochoa, Mexico's consul general in the Texas border city of
                  El Paso, said the decision to arrest and deport hundreds of legal residents
                  was inhumane and should be reconsidered.

                  Federal agents across Texas last week arrested hundreds of legal immigrants
                  with multiple drunk driving convictions. Almost all of those arrested are now
                  awaiting deportation proceedings, and the vast majority are Mexican
                  citizens.

                  "They're targeting Mexicans," Ortiz Ochoa said at a news conference in El
                  Paso. "Why aren't they rounding up Czechoslovakians in Minnesota?"

                  He said many of those arrested were the sole breadwinners in the family and
                  that many of their wives and children were U.S. citizens.

                  "They're destroying families, not just Mexican families but American families
                  too," he said, adding that 82 percent of the Mexicans arrested had children
                  and that half were arrested at home in front of their families.

                  Under federal legislation passed in 1996, the Immigration and Naturalization
                  Service can deport permanent legal immigrants who have been convicted of
                  serious violent crimes such as murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and
                  sexual assault.

                  Earlier this year, the Board of Immigration Appeals added drunk driving to
                  the list of violent offenses covered by the law, which can be applied to past
                  offenses.

                  Driving while intoxicated is a third-degree felony under Texas law. Officials
                  said dozens more immigrants were still being sought in Texas and that agents
                  would soon carry out similar operations in other states across the country.

                  Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.