DURHAM - Angela Guerrero knew she might be overwhelmed for a few weeks, possibly a month, juggling work, child care and the daily grind of family life when her husband set out for the U.S. consulate offices in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

She never expected to be in the predicament she is in -- her husband of five years banned from this country for at least a decade, her family torn between two countries and a tangle of immigration issues to unsnarl.

Ricardo Guerrero, an illegal immigrant, had tired of looking over his shoulder, constantly wondering whether deportation was just a misstep away.

So one February day, Guerrero kissed his family goodbye in Durham. Eager to stop living on the fringes of the law, as many illegal immigrants do, he flew to his native Mexico with papers a Wake County notary public had helped him prepare and a two-page letter from his American-born wife.

His optimistic plan was to return with a green card, the official document that would give him better access to the jobs and education he dreamed of when he came to this country nine years ago in search of a better life.

But those hopes were dashed by what immigration lawyers say is a sweeping problem -- notaries who are unauthorized and unlicensed to practice law overstepping their bounds and giving bad advice about immigration laws and procedures.

A family divided

Now the Guerreros are a family divided by a border and thousands of miles.

He's in Mexico City with their sons Cauhtli, 2, and Yoali, 5. She's raising the school-age girls Kristine, 12, and Samantha, 8, in Durham, the city where she has lived all but a few years of her life.

"It gets really hard, really depressing," Angela Guerrero, 30, said. "I feel like it's just like imprisoning somebody. All of us as a family, all of us are in prison. And for what? What have we done to have our family separated like this?"

The family's experience is the backbone of a civil lawsuit filed in the Durham County courthouse by the N.C. Justice Center against Eiblys and Edna Ochoa, who run Global Enterprises of North Carolina, an immigration-service business that once had offices in Durham, Wake County and Wilson.

Jose Antonio Guillen Mendoza, a Mexican citizen and North Carolina resident, is also party to the suit, which the Justice Center hopes to pursue as a class-action case.

The Ochoas, through their lawyer, John M. Kirby of Raleigh, have declined to comment about the allegations. But in court documents they have disputed the claims and asked for the case to be dismissed.

Ricardo Guerrero sought the assistance of the Ochoas in 2004 after tuning in to a weekly Spanish-language radio program on WETC 540 AM. Eiblys Ochoa, according to the suit, dispensed advice on immigration law to callers, often telling them to visit Global Enterprises storefront offices for further assistance.

Many callers to the radio show referred to Eiblys Ochoa as "abogado," the Spanish word for lawyer. Although he is not a lawyer, the suit said, the radio personality failed to correct those who called in for advice.

'He can help us'

In the Guerreros' Durham home, the radio was often tuned to Spanish-language stations. Angela Guerrero, a North Carolina native whose Spanish is limited, remembers the day her husband decided to seek the assistance of the Ochoas.

"He heard this guy and said, 'Well, we can go to him, he can help us get our paperwork together,' " Angela Guerrero recalls. "I was thinking because we were married -- we were told our situation looked good -- that we wouldn't have a problem."

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