Word: juan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When teenage brothers Juan and Alex Gomez were awakened at dawn on July 25 and arrested by U.S. immigration officials, they simply became two more among the thousands of kids who get snared in deportation dragnets along with their parents. But this week Juan's Internet-savvy high school friends in Miami have turned his case into a cause celebre in Washington - and even if the brothers eventually do get deported, the publicity they've garnered may well boost the passage of a federal immigration bill that would keep other young people like them from suffering the same fate...
...Juan, 18, and Alex, 19, were toddlers when their Colombian parents brought them on a visit to the U.S. in 1990. Despite having only a six-month visa, the family did not return to their war-torn country and remained in Florida. They started a modest business, sidestepping federal immigration authorities for almost two decades. The boys, meanwhile, grew up as Americans and excelled at school - especially Juan, who mastered 15 advanced-placement courses at Miami's Killian Senior High School and almost aced the SAT before graduating this past spring. Because the law denies benefits such as in-state...
...some 65,000 kids graduate from high school in the U.S. under similar circumstances. Thousands face deportation along with their parents if the family gets collared for breaking immigration laws, as the Gomezes clearly did. But unlike most undocumented kids, who often live in the shadows like their parents, Juan had a U.S. citizen army of school chums in his corner who cried foul: You can't send Juan and Alex to live in a Third World country they don't even know, they argued, simply because of something their parents did. With the Gomez family sitting in a South...
Then, this week, they stormed D.C. with a teen lobbying effort that seemed like something out of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. "We're going to give it our all," Scott Elfenbein, one of Juan's schoolmates, told reporters on Capitol Hill. "We have to show [Congress] the flaws in the system." Says Kelleen Corrigan, detention attorney for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC) in Miami, which is working on behalf of Juan and Alex, "Juan is lucky to have such a dedicated, extremely astute group of friends. It's been really touching to watch...
...declaring men safe or out. Shag Crawford was proudly one of them, a tough ump from the old school, and he presided over plenty of drama in his two decades at the corners and behind the plate. He broke up one of baseball's scariest fights when an enraged Juan Marichal of the San Francisco Giants clubbed Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro on the head with a bat. He also had the nerve to eject a manager in the World Series: Baltimore's voluble Earl Weaver, in the fourth game of the 1969 series with the New York Mets...