A woman, a Mayan Native from Guatemala, has been reunited with her children three years after state officials took them away and she was deported.

Mercedes Santiago-Felipe's children were returned to her last month, ending a struggle that reached the Nebraska Supreme Court.

"It's worked out to a happy ending," said one of her lawyers, Milo Mumgaard of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest.

Santiago-Felipe sought asylum in the United States more than 10 years ago during Guatemala's civil war. Her father was among an estimated 200,000 people killed in the war, which ended in 1996.

She eventually settled in central Nebraska with her son, now 10 years old, and daughter, now 6. The children were born in the United States to Santiago-Felipe. Their father, also from Guatemala, later abandoned the family.

Santiago-Felipe eked out a living at a meatpacking plant and doing housework around Grand Island. That all started to unravel in November 2000, when her son went to school with a red mark on his face.

School officials and police counseled Santiago-Felipe, who speaks some Spanish but is fluent only in her Mayan dialect and cannot read, on proper ways to discipline her children and warned that she could be arrested if she hit her children.

She said the police officer, however, spoke only limited Spanish, and she did not completely understand what he was saying.

Four months later, a counselor noticed another red mark on the boy's face, punishment for not getting ready for school, the boy said.

Police arrested Santiago-Felipe and charged her with misdemeanor child abuse, and the children were placed in foster care.

Santiago-Felipe was kept in jail and deported two months later because immigration officials had a "hold" on her for missing an asylum application hearing years earlier in Florida.

Hall County Court Judge Philip Martin Jr. authorized the permanent placement of her children in foster care and terminated her parental rights in September 2002.

Santiago-Felipe had a court-appointed lawyer for only one week. The lawyer removed himself from the case before she was deported.

She said she was not told that she could contest her removal and remain in the United States to seek reunification with her children.

The state did not inform Santiago-Felipe of its intent to terminate her parental rights — other than running a small notice in a newspaper, Mumgaard said.

In a January ruling by the high court, Chief Justice John Hendry said the state had denied her due process when the children were taken.

"Mercedes was incarcerated in the Hall County jail next door to the courthouse where the proceeding was conducted," Hendry wrote. "She was neither represented by counsel at the adjudication hearing nor had she waived this right."

She later returned to Nebraska to try to get custody of her children. The family now lives in the Grand Island area.

"The Supreme Court told everybody what to do, and everybody did it," Mumgaard said. "The people that we'd actually fought with … became very cooperative."