Former U.S. Army Pvt. Kimberly Rivera is posing for a photo with her husband and four children on the double bed that all but fills the living room of their one-bedroom Parkdale apartment.

They are surrounded by kids’ art, hanging by clothes pegs from a string across one wall. Their only seating — a couch — lines another wall, facing a television in the middle of the room.

The Riveras don’t have much in the way of possessions.

“I’ve always been just a minimum-wage earner,” said Rivera. Recently turned 30, she looks back on her life unimpressed. “When you get to those milestones, it doesn’t feel so good.”

But while good fortune has eluded her, the soft-spoken Texan gained the support of a nationwide community of peace and human rights activists.

Since coming here in 2007 to avoid a second deployment to Iraq, Rivera has become the public face of U.S. war resisters in Canada.

“That’s the most positive thing I’ve done,” she says of becoming a conscientious objector. But it may not be enough.

A Thursday deportation order looms, despite frantic calls from supporters, politicians and even a Nobel Peace Prize winner to stay the order and allow Rivera and her family, including two Canadian-born children, to remain.

About 80 supporters gathered in front of Toronto’s federal courthouse Wednesday evening, one of several such rallies across the country calling on Immigration Minister Jason Kenny to intervene in Rivera's case.

“The support for Iraq War resisters in Canada has been overwhelming,” said Ken Marciniec, of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

“It’s barbaric that they would send her back, separate her from her kids, and deport her to the States to face jail time,” said teacher Davis Benjamin, who attended the rally. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ottawa allowed Vietnam-era draft-dodgers and deserters alike to immigrate freely, but has taken a hard line this time.

They’re “not genuine refugees under the internationally accepted meaning of the term,” Alexis Pavlich, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, wrote in an email. “These unfounded claims clog up our system for genuine refugees who are actually fleeing persecution.”

Rivera has applied to stay permanently on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. That request continues despite the deportation order that followed a negative “pre-removal risk assessment,” which is based on whether the person’s return could result in persecution, torture, cruel and unusual punishment, or even loss of life.

Alyssa Manning, Rivera’s lawyer, went to court this week to ask for a stay of the deportation order until the application for permanent residency was decided. But on Wednesday, a federal court judge denied the motion.

As with other deported U.S. war resisters, it’s expected the mother of four will be detained at the border and will face a court martial and military jail time.

Rivera, the eldest of two sisters from a hard-working family in Mesquite, Texas, joined the army in 2006 not only for “stability, college and decent benefits,” but because she “wanted to fight for human rights and the safety of my country.”

“I wanted to do something good … I grew up learning that our rights come from a soldier who gave his or her life so that we could have rights.”

That view changed radically after she served three months in Baghdad, when she decided the war wasn’t a “humanitarian mission, and it was not helping the people of Iraq.”

Rivera says “citizens were being put on random lock-downs. We used city patrols, checkpoints and violence and intimidation against innocent civilians. We raided their houses without cause. I saw mothers and fathers and grandparents and children come to us asking for compensation for their dead loved ones. There was no good reason for their pain and suffering.”

It troubled her so much she went on duty without her weapon. When she was reprimanded and forced to carry it, she did so without ammunition.

The family came here while Rivera was on a two-week leave.

“It’s crazy. It went by pretty fast,” she says of the past five years.

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Rivera is well-known and well-loved in her neighbourhood, where she’s involved in a community garden and volunteers with the art-therapy group SKETCH, as well as the lunch program at the Parkdale Neighborhood Church. After the deportation order went out, 200 people showed up at a support rally in a hot, crowded church basement, where Parkdale-High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo said: “There’s nothing more important than keeping you here.”

At the rally’s end, son Christian, 10, as loquacious as his mother is shy, grabbed the mic and said, “I hope we get to stay. I’m a little war resister.” Rivera also has two daughters: Rebecca, 8, and Katie, 3.

“The critical thing is that two of her children were born here,” says DiNovo, who read a statement at Queen’s Park asking Ottawa to stay the deportation. “It would be horribly abusive in breaking up her family.”

DiNovo’s husband Donald Zielinski, who died 20 years ago, was a Vietnam draft dodger who came to Canada from Chicago in the late ’60s. He was one of thousands granted amnesty by Jimmy Carter in 1977, but never returned.

The crescendo of voices calling for mercy in Rivera’s case includes MP Peggy Nash, Councillor Gord Perks, the Canadian Council of Churches, the United Church of Canada, the federal NDP party, Amnesty International, Green Peace, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, National Union of Provincial and General Employees and the United Steel Workers.

“These are people of courage; they are people of peace and they should be granted asylum,” wrote Nobel laureate Rev. Desmond Tutu. “The deportation order given to Kimberly Rivera and her family is unjust and must be challenged.”

Gloria Nafziger, a refugee and migrant rights coordinator with Amnesty International Canada, says that interpretation is “open to debate.”

“The line of thinking is that detention is a fair penalty for somebody who chooses to go AWOL,” says Nafziger. “And it is — except if … you’re being treated more harshly than other people who go AWOL. Then you have to decide if that’s prosecution or persecution.”

After reviewing her case, Amnesty declared Rivera to be a conscientious objector, someone whose “deeply held personal convictions would prohibit them from participating in a war,” Nafziger said.

Nafziger was struck especially by the fact that Rivera had laid down her gun while on duty, refusing to do violence to others.

“To me, when you don’t have the words or anything else, but you just say, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ that to me is a profound sign of somebody who is wrestling with their conscience over what it is they’re doing and why they’re doing it.”

It’s particularly striking considering that Rivera has a limited education and was unaccustomed to challenging authority. She “signed up because she was poor and needed money — as many Americans did,” Nafziger said.

Rivera’s circumstances are not unlike many Vietnam deserters, who, according to a Canadian government website, were “predominantly sons of the lower–income and working classes who had been inducted into the armed services directly from high school or who had volunteered, hoping to obtain a skill and broaden their limited horizons.”

The Vietnam draft dodgers, in contrast, “were usually college–educated sons of the middle class who could no longer defer induction into the Selective Service System.”

Amnesty believes Rivera’s right to refuse military service is covered under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. That could come into play in her application to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.