WASHINGTON -- A human rights group charges that harsh immigration laws in the U.S. have separated more than 1.5 million children and spouses from family members who have been deported.

“The laws are not only cruel in their rigidity, they are senseless,” said Alison Parker, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s U.S. program. She authored the report.

"How do you explain to a child that her father has been sent thousands of miles away and can never come home simply because he forged a check?" she asked.

The report said separations throw families into financial turmoil, forcing them to sell their homes and costing them their jobs and businesses.

Congress toughened immigration laws in 1996, making legal and illegal immigrants deportable under an expanded list of what are termed "aggravated felonies."

The law also eliminated hearings in which judges could consider an immigrant's family, military service or possible persecution in their native country to stop deportation.

The Homeland Security Department reports that more than 672,000 immigrants have been deported for crimes since the law passed, most of them for non-violent offenses.

Human Rights Watch said there are an average of 74,000 deportations every year, and that the annual number of deportees has risen each year, jumping the most between 1996, before the new laws took effect, and 1998, when they had been in place for a full calendar year.

The report said families have had to sell their homes and sometimes seek psychological treatment after someone on the family is deported. It also said some refugees have been sent to places where they fear persecution.

Among the changes in deportation laws recommended by Human Rights Watch:

• Having impartial adjudicators run hearing in which a non-citizen’s interest in remaining in the United States is weighed against the U.S. interest in deporting the individual.
• Making sure that family relationships, the best interests of children, the length of legal presence the United States and evidence of investment in U.S. communities -- business, military service, property ownership -- are taken into account.
• Protecting individuals whose lives or freedom would be threatened if returned unless they have been convicted of a particularly serious crime and are dangerous to their U.S. community.
• Ensuring that only non-citizens who have committed serious and violent crimes -- not misdemeanor crimes -- for which they have served an actual prison term are subject to deportation.
• Allowing state and federal criminal judges to sentence incarceration or other forms of criminal punishment without including deportation.

Reacting to the report, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement immigrants who violate the law forfeit their right to be in the U.S.

Steven Camorata, Center for Immigration Studies research director, said nothing keeps families from returning with a deported member.

"Children constantly bear the consequences of their parents' poor decisions," he said.