TITLE: Immersions of the hyperbolic plane
QUESTION [24 upvotes]: Is it possible to isometrically immerse the hyperbolic plane into a compact Riemannian manifold as a totally geodesic submanifold? Any nice examples?
Edit: Although I did not originally say so, I was looking for injective immersions or at least for immersions that do not factor through a covering onto a compact surface. Thank you for your answers and comments, they've been very helpful.

REPLY [3 votes]: Definitely the simplest examples are the covering maps from the upperf half space to a compact hyperbolic surface that Bryant mentioned, although these are not injective. A slight variation is to consider the main diagonal embedding $ \imath: \mathbb{H}^2 \to \mathbb{H}^2 \times \mathbb{H}^2$ and then use different projections on each factor. For example, the first can be the orbit projection $\pi : \mathbb{H} \to \mathbb{H}^2/G$ where $G \subset PSL(2, \mathbb{R})$ contains no translations in the real axis and the second could be $ \pi \circ T$ where $T$ is any of such translations. Then $(\pi, \pi \circ T) \circ \imath $ is one to one.
On the other hand, every compact hyperbolic 3-manifold has plenty of totally geodesic immersed $\mathbb{H}^2$ by just projecting totally geodesics $\mathbb{H}^2 \subset \mathbb{H}^3$, as Bryant pointed it is not clear whether  the projection could be made injective. 
This should be a comment but I am not able to comment yet :)