DREAMer Juan Sebastian Gomez' parents left for Colombia over a year ago. He finished high school and is now attending Georgetown University. Since the DREAM Act has been stalled for so long, Juan is still in limbo. He is doing very well at Georgetown. But the best grades won't protect him until Congress decides to do the right thing and pass the DREAM Act.
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The Outsider
Though he's lived in this country since he was 2, Juan Gomez has no permanent legal right to stay in the United States, let alone a guarantee of a chance to graduate from Georgetown University
By Phuong Ly
Sunday, February 22, 2009; Page W10
Washington Post Magazine
For several minutes, Juan, who'd only seen photographs of the campus before, simply stared. A friend's mother who accompanied him on that late-August day last summer recalls that the brown-haired 19-year-old looked just like any other student in his jeans and polo shirt. But Juan felt as if he had landed in another universe -- a place light years away from the deportation letters, detention center jumpsuits and painful goodbyes of the previous year.
"Wow," he told his friend's mother, bounding up the steps to his new dorm. "This is so beautiful."
Juan was still beaming as he examined the sterile, white-walled space in Copley Hall that he would share with another student. "This room," he said, gazing at the two twin beds, two wooden desks and two dressers squeezed together, "is just great." He meant it. Juan felt lucky to be at Georgetown, even though, in terms of academic accomplishment, he clearly belonged there.
His record is a litany of overachievement: a 1410 out of 1600 on the SAT; high scores on 13 Advanced Placement exams, which earned him close to two years of college credit; and a top-20 class rank at a competitive Miami high school. But Juan doesn't have a clear right to be in the United States, much less at Georgetown. In 1990, when he was 2 years old, his family came to this country from Colombia on a tourist visa and never left. Once they were here, they applied for political asylum and spent almost 17 years building a modest life before their legal status finally caught up with them. In October 2007, after they were repeatedly denied political asylum, Juan's parents and grandmother were deported to Colombia, a country that Juan can't even remember. more
2 comments:
This is a great response in regards to the Georgetown Student who may be deported back to Columbia.
I was surprised that your article didn't deal more with the issue of the degree to which his parents are responsible for his current situation. It seems that the most difficult part of the problem -- that he may be deported to a country that he has no ties to -- is 100% his parents' fault. They knowingly broke the laws and brought their child up in a country with a very different culture, knowing they could be deported at any time. It seems they could have taken steps to better inform their son about the country had a very real possiblity of being deported to.
I also didn't understand why this case was considered a "special" one -- there are thousands of children who have lived most of their lives here who are subject to deportation -- the fact that he goes to Georgetown and they don't doesn't make their loss any less. and the idea that losing him was a particular blow to our nation -- the loss of a talented individual -- made little sense given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of scientists, etc. with PhDs who are trying for legal entry to the US and are denied, and these people have far more achievements under their belts than merely getting into G-town.
Comment will be visible after blog owner approval? I hope this is just for monitoring explicit language and not trying to control our constitutional right of the freedom of speech.
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