The Tribune

By HELEN O'NEILL AP Special Correspondent SHE was tiny and trembling and looked so very vulnerable. Barely 15, having already experienced a lifetime of hardships since losing her mother at five and crossing the desert with her father, she clutched a microphone before a crowd in New York's Union Square. "My name is Diana," she said. "I am undocumented and unafraid." With those words last March, another young woman stepped "out of the shadows." It began several years ago, tentatively, almost furtively, with a few small rallies and a few provocative T-shirts. In the past two years it has grown into a full-fledged movement, emboldening thousands of young people, terrifying their parents, and unsettling authorities unsure of how to respond. From California to Georgia to New York, children of families who live here illegally are "coming out" -- marching behind banners that say "undocumented and unafraid," staging sit-ins in federal offices, and getting arrested in the most defiant ways -- in front of the Alabama Capitol, outside federal immigration courts and detention centers, in Maricopa County, Arizona, home of the sworn enemy of illegal immigrants, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In "outing" their families as well as themselves, they know they risk being deported. But as states pass ever more stringent anti-illegal immigration laws -- and critics denounce their parents as criminals -- these young people say they have no choice. Even critics who are sympathetic to their cause say the federal government has failed to secure the US borders and that it's too costly to provide schooling, hospital care and other public services to non-citizens. Offering a path to citizenship for those brought into the country illegally as children, they say, simply rewards the parents' law-breaking. Still, more young people are publicly "coming out" and asserting their right to stay. They include Mandeep Chahal, a 21-year-old medical student who came to California from India when she was six. Cesar Andrade, a 19-year old student and tennis coach in New York City who came from Ecuador when he was 8. And Heyra Avila, a feisty 16-year-old from Florence, Kentucky, whose Mexican parents considered putting her up for adoption so she could become legal. They are American in every way except on paper, they say. Why should they be branded, judged and punished? "Coming out was like a weight was lifted," says Angy Rivera, a 21-year-old New Yorker, who was born in Colombia and came here with her mother when she was three. "It was liberating. I wasn't lying about my life anymore." While Rivera was growing up in Queens, her mother told her to trust no one, to stay away from people in authority, to never mention her immigration status. But it wasn't until Rivera started looking for jobs and applying to college that she fully understood how different she was. She couldn't work without a Social Security number. And, as a non-citizen, she wasn't eligible for financial aid, despite top grades. She struggled to find scholarships and grants, winning one with a poignant poem about her dilemma titled "Unidentified Identity". She would look at her three younger siblings -- all citizens because they were born here -- and weep. Unlike her, they didn't have to worry about college, jobs, driving, travelling, planning a future. Rivera is active in the New York State Youth Leadership Council, which offers training sessions on "coming out," lobbies lawmakers in Albany, and has an impressive website packed with information and practical advice for undocumented youth on everything from health care and college applications to dating. It is one of many such organisations that have sprung up across the country, focused on helping youth, fighting deportations, and educating the public about the kind of stateless limbo in which they feel trapped. "Oh my God, what are you doing? Are you trying to get us deported?" Rivera's mother cried after her daughter marched outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in downtown New York in 2010. Rivera was scared, too. But, like others, she has found comfort in community and safety in numbers -- along with a growing sense of a need to take bigger risks in order to force change. And so they are escalating their protests, testing the Obama administration's professed new policy of "prosecutorial discretion," designed to focus on the deportation of known criminals, not students or immigrants with no criminal record. "When we challenge the system, the system doesn't know what to do with us," says Mohammad Abdollahi, a member of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance who has traveled around the country, organising some of the boldest protests to date. Abdollahi, 26, who came from Iran at the age of three and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a powerful personal story. As a gay man, he cannot return to a country where homosexuality is a crime punishable by imprisonment or even death -- a fact he says he uses to good effect whenever he is threatened with deportation. Today Abdollahi laughs when he recalls the early days of the movement in 2006 and 2007 -- the furtive online conversations with other anonymous youth, afraid that if their identity was exposed immigration agents would come crashing through their doors. "I was scared to use my real name, even in emails," he said. Back then, the movement was focused mainly on the DREAM Act, which would allow a path to citizenship for some undocumented youth who graduated from high school and spent two years in college or in the military. The act has failed several times. Disgusted by its failure in 2007, Abdollahi and others decided it was time for more radical action. They organised small "coming out" events in safe areas, like college campuses. The first big "Coming Out of the Shadows" rally was in Chicago in March 2010. The movement quickly gathered strength, with young people actively fighting and publicizing deportation cases, organising annual "coming out" rallies across the country, and -- taking cues from the civil rights movement -- getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience. Abdollahi's first arrest came in May 2010 at the Tucson, Arizona, office of Republican Senator John McCain. Abdollahi and four other student activists, dressed in royal blue graduation gowns and caps, sat down in the reception area under an American flag and refused to leave. It was the movement's first act of civil disobedience. McCain, who co-sponsored the DREAM Act in 2007, angered undocumented youth by backing off during the 2008 election, saying he would not support it without tighter border controls. Abdollahi spent the night at the Pima County jail before being transferred to an ICE processing facility. There, he says, he was locked in a room with about 20 undocumented men who had been rounded up in an ICE raid. They were shackled and led to a van to be driven to the border and deported. The "privileged undocumented students" Abdollahi says, were freed. It was a lesson the movement took to heart. Over and over, when young undocumented activists band together -- with lawyers lined up and plenty of media coverage -- they are let go. They are winning some powerful support. There is now well-connected network of immigration lawyers, educators and other professionals offering their services for free. And last summer, at a boisterous "coming out" rally in Atlanta, civil rights veteran Rep. John Lewis of Georgia chanted "undocumented and unafraid" and told a cheering throng of young people that he was prepared to get arrested with them. "The jails of Georgia, the jails of America are not large enough to hold all of us," Lewis thundered. ICE issues a standard statement after such arrests and rallies, saying its new approach to enforcement "includes targeting criminal aliens and those who put public safety at risk, as well as those who threaten border security and the integrity of the immigration system." The new ICE policy, adopted a year ago, also calls for agents to consider how long someone has been in the country and whether that person's spouse or children are US citizens.