UPDATED: Federal Government Drops Its Case Against New Haven High Senior
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<b>But now 17-year-old Noe Guzman has no legal status and no easy answer as to what comes next.<br />
Guzman moved to Michigan from Mexico with his mother when he was 4. His mother had obtained a Social Security number for him which belonged to a dead man.
In the summer of 2003, when he was 12, the family, which had grown to include a stepfather and baby sister, moved to New Haven.
Guzman, the only Hispanic in his class, made many friends.
The ICE decision will likely allow Guzman to stay in the U.S. long enough to finish high school.
Guzman and his attorney, Katie Herbert Meyer, legal director and staff attorney for Interfaith Legal Services for Immigrants, a nonprofit organization, have exhausted almost every option to help him stay in the U.S., which is the only place he knows as home.
His freshman year of high school, Guzman talked with a Marine Corps recruiter who came to the school.
The recruiter had set up a pull-up bar, offering a free T-shirt to anyone who could do 20. Guzman did 22. The recruiter told him about his options.
"I got really interested in it and I talked to my mom, but she was against it," he told The Missourian.
Guzman wasn't discouraged. He took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an exam which determines qualifications for enrollment in the military, over the summer prior to his senior year. The plan was to sign up for delayed enlistment.
He scored an 89, which is a percentile score. He exceeded the requirements to join the Marines, or any other military branch for that matter.
Guzman scored a 23 on his ACT, above the state average of 21.6 and the national average of 21.1.
Guzman, wants to be an anesthesiologist, said a field like diesel mechanics or another hands-on job would pique his interest.
His goal is to help people. "It's not about the money," he said.
Guzman plans to go to school and then work to pay off its costs before doing work in another country helping the less fortunate.
On Aug. 13, 2008, Guzman returned to the Robert Young Federal Building in St. Louis after his first trip to take the ASVAB, for his Military Entrance Processing Station, or MEPS, physical.
Upon completing a series of tests and other paperwork, Guzman was detained and pulled aside into a holding area. There, he was scolded for something he knew nothing about.
"They were yelling at me, saying things like 'How could you think you could get away with this?' " Guzman said. "I was confused."
Guzman was handcuffed and shackled. He was led to see a ICE agent who told him that his Social Security number did not belong to him.
That same number was the one Guzman had used for years including at his job at the local swimming pool.
"I saw all these problems that illegal immigrants faced, and we had never had any of them," he said.
That was when he found out how he came to be in the U.S. He said his mother fled to the U.S. to escape an abusive husband and father, who Guzman has never met.
Even with the prosecutorial discretion, Guzman has a deadline. "I have to leave by November," he said.
Because of U.S. policy, Guzman would need to sign up for voluntary deportation before his 18th birthday. Otherwise, if and when he is deported, voluntary or not, he would be forced to stay out of the country for 10 years.
Upon returning to Mexico, Guzman has little idea what he will do.
He could apply for a student visa and hope to return to the U.S. to begin his college career. He already has looked into East Central College as a place that accepts international students, he said.
He and Meyer have explored every other possible legal road they could, but because Guzman entered the U.S. illegally, there are few options.
Guzman has no family members who are lawfully permitted to be in the U.S. He has no dependents, and he likely has no hardship which would allow him to avoid deportation.
Combined with his legal troubles, Guzman has tried to balance the task of being a kid. He was a cross country track runner for the school but was forced to take his senior year off because of gall bladder surgery.
"There are days when I really can't take the stress," he said.
He has a girlfriend, Alexis, who struggled to deal with the news of his situation, and friends who have tried to be as uplifting as supportive as he has to them.
"Most of my classes are challenging, but I'm in the upper portion of my class," Guzman said proudly.
Luckily Guzman has had some help along the way from people like Pastor David Poe, whose son, Tyler, considers Guzman to be his best friend.
"Apparently, Noe was so embarrassed by the incident at the recruiter's office that he didn't tell anyone for about it for weeks," Poe said.
"Tyler and Miranda (Poe's daughter) told me the story and informed me that Noe had a court date set to appear before a judge in St. Louis," Poe said.
"At the U.S. Federal Court in St. Louis, Noe and his mother appeared before the judge via closed circuit television. Because they appeared before the judge without a lawyer, they were granted a month's extension to find legal representation," he said.
Following his confrontation with ICE, Guzman had his first deportation hearing in October 2008, and another in December.
Both times, he had yet to find an attorney. With the help of Meyer, Guzman made another appearance in court in February. Meyer asked for time to build a case.
Poe, State Rep. Charlie Schlottach and others, including New Haven Superintendent Kyle Kruse took time to write letters to ICE in support of Guzman.
"A lot of us wrote letters to ICE on behalf of Noe and asked them to exercise their discretion in making this as workable and manageable situation as possible," Kruse said.
"It's just a shame that someone like Noe, who was trying to do the right thing and enlist and serve his country, got caught up in a net like this," he said. "It just doesn't seem right."
While ICE droped its case against Guzman, there is no guarantee as to how much time it will buy him.
"We're trying to do everything we can, but we're running out of options. We're keeping our hopes up," Guzman said, smiling.
One option remaining would be for the U.S. Congress to pass a special private bill allowing Guzman to stay.
Only 36 of those bills have passed since 1996, according to a Feb. 22 article in the Washington Post.
Another possibility would be if the federal government passed the DREAM Act, which would allow eligible immigrant students who graduate from U.S. high schools to obtain temporary residency.
If the DREAM Act were to pass, Guzman would have another possible way to stay in the country despite being an illegal alien.
Unfortunately for Guzman, he lives in Missouri, a state where both senators, Claire McCaskill and Kit Bond, voted against the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM Act.
The act fell short of the 60-vote mark needed in the Senate for most bills to advance in 2007.
The act would allow immigrant students who graduate from U.S. high schools to obtain temporary residency and have a chance to gain permanent residency.
Eligible immigrants would be given six years to attend college and earn a two-year degree or complete two years of classes toward a four-year degree or serve in the military for two years.
They then would be granted permanent residency, a major step on the road to citizenship.
"There's a very good chance the DREAM Act will be enacted, which would solve Noe's problems as well as similar problems of thousands of others," said Mark Silverman with the Immegrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco.
"We should be deporting terrorists, not young men like Noe who want to contribute to our society," he said.
"That's why we need the DREAM Act. We invest, by law, 12-13 years into the education of these young people. The best of them will want to go on to college, and in addition to squashing their dreams, it's a terrible waste of tax payers' money," Silverman said.
The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C., estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants who would qualify for the DREAM Act graduate from U.S. high schools each year.
While more obvious in the Western states, roughly one-fourth of the nation's kindergartners are Hispanic. If the trend continues, minority children will become the majority by 2023.
Census data released last month showed that Hispanics made up 20 percent of all students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
In colleges, they make up 12 percent of full-time undergraduate students.
While drastically lower than the national Hispanic population, the figures represent a swiftly growing group.
Whether or not the DREAM Act passes, many nationally have seen cases, like Guzman's, as reasons to be more critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
A recent report from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank, noted a spike for the 2006 fiscal year in arrests of nonfugitives, or illegals who have no criminal record but are simply status violators.
The total grew to 35 percent of total arrests in 2006, and grew to 40 percent the following year. The surges followed the implementation of a quota arrest system.
Each of the National Fugitives Operations Program teams were given a 1,000-arrests-per-year quota beginning in 2006.
The MPI report also cited a lack of prioritization of dangerous fugitives over nonfugitives and the lack of a protocol to address constitutional and humanitarian concerns during operations.
Funding for the fugitive operations teams, or FOTs, has risen from $9,333,519 in the 2003 fiscal year to $218,945,000 in the 2008 fiscal year.
Over the same time period, arrests grew from 1,900 to 33,997, according to an ICE report from October 2008.
