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Wednesday, Jul 05, 2006
Posted on Wed, Jul. 05, 2006
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Clock ticking as teen fights deportation

Exceptional student has until March 2007 to find way to stay in U.S.

By LAUREN MARKOE
Special to The State
Griselda Lopez Negrete signs some papers at USC Aiken last Friday.
TIM DOMINICK/TDOMINICK@THESTATE.COM
Griselda Lopez Negrete signs some papers at USC Aiken last Friday.
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As they do around every Independence Day holiday, the Negrete family of Aiken gathered in the backyard, set off fireworks and served up the cake with the red, white and blue icing.

And as she does every year, Griselda Lopez Negrete wondered if she will ever get to celebrate this most American of holidays as she has long dreamed she would — as an American.

“I keep hoping for the best and pushing the bad things that could happen aside,” said Negrete, 18. “But I know the worst could happen. That would be devastating.”

The worst is that she is deported to Mexico, her birthplace, but a place she does not remember and where only the most distant of relatives live.

That is unlikely to happen in the near future. But a road to citizenship, a college education and a future in South Carolina remains in doubt.

Negrete, who was smuggled across the border as a toddler and raised in Aiken, still finds herself in immigration limbo. Today, she still is neither a citizen nor a legal resident.

Two years ago, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made Negrete one of the most unique stories in the immigration debate. Facing deportation, Negrete took her first plane trip, to Washington. There, she talked with Graham. He promised to file, and later did, a rare type of bill that would assure she could not be forced out of the country during the current, two-year congressional session.

It was a temporary solution to one immigrant’s problem.

Graham told Negrete the special bill would allow her to finish Silver Bluff High School in Aiken.

She graduated last month, with honors.

Now, she has no immigration papers to show potential employers. For the same lack of documentation, she has failed to get a driver’s license.

“I have to be driven everywhere,” said Negrete, who lost her mother when she was 8 and lives with an uncle who is a citizen.

Perhaps most frustrating to the teen is that she might not be able to use a state-sponsored LIFE scholarship she would otherwise qualify for because she cannot prove she is a legal resident of South Carolina.

Negrete wants to study business at USC Aiken. An official there said the college will review her case to determine her residency after she applies.

It will be a struggle without a scholarship. Tuition is $3,064 per semester and more than double that for nonresidents.

But figuring out how to attend college is far less stressful than the imminent threat of deportation Negrete faced two years ago. For the moment, she seems safe on American soil.

FINDING A WAY

Graham’s bill expires at the end of this year. An immigration judge has ruled her right to live in this country won’t be challenged before March 2007.

In the meantime, Negrete is trying to acquire legal residency the conventional way, through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the successor to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

If that doesn’t happen by March 2007, Graham says he will file another bill to stave off deportation.

And what happens, two years later, if she is still not legal when that bill expires?

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop.

Negrete is working with her lawyer, Glenda Bunce of Catholic Charities Immigration Services in Columbia, to get herself documented.

It is proving difficult, however, even for a teenager with a Southern accent who competed nationally with her high school’s Future Business Leaders of America team this spring.

“It’s very harsh,” Bunce says of the array of appointments and body of laws and regulations that have consigned Negrete to immigration purgatory.

One of the most promising paths she and Bunce are pursuing would require the teenager to live in Mexico — they’re hoping for months, not years — and then re-enter the United States legally. It’s not clear how long she would have to be gone.

Negrete’s case evokes sympathy: the mother who died of an aneurysm six years after their illegal border crossing, Negrete’s own entrepreneurial spirit and dream of becoming a businesswoman, and her selflessness — attested to by her teachers, priest and lawyers.

When Graham first told Negrete he would file a bill on her behalf, she politely beseeched him to support The Dream Act, a bill that would allow other young people in similar situations to stay in the United States and pay in-state tuition at their local public colleges.

Graham voted for that as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill the Senate passed in May.

MAKING EXCEPTIONS

It is because she was trying to help a relative gain citizenship that Negrete’s own troubles began.

She was translating for an aunt in a Charleston immigration office three years ago when an official asked her about her own status. She told the truth: illegal.

Two years ago, a story in The State about the possibility Negrete soon could be deported elicited several phone calls from readers offering to adopt her. Dozens of e-mails asked how the United States could deport such a smart, kind and patriotic young woman.

There are other views that look at the picture beyond Negrete’s case. The concerns are coming into sharper focus as the nation grapples with immigration and tries to agree upon a set of rules for the millions of Mexicans and others who come to the United States illegally.

Jack Martin, special projects director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says amnesty programs, such as The Dream Act, harm the United States.

“Any amnesty program simply encourages illegal immigration,” he said. The result, he said, is a society that approves the flouting of its own laws and pays to have its own schools and hospitals burdened with people who have no right to be in the country.

He knows however, that these arguments can be hard to hear when those who differ point to a young illegal immigrant like Negrete.

“It’s the old issue of the forest and the trees,” Martin said. “You have to look at what’s in the long-term national interest and that has to trump concerns with regard to any one individual.”

As far as Negrete’s hope that The Dream Act will pass and help illegal immigrants to attend public colleges, Martin has a suggestion.

“She is a Mexican national,” he said. “Mexico has a subsidized higher education system. She would be able to put to good advantage the taxpayer-funded education she has already secured in the United States.”

Though Negrete’s dream school for the fall semester is USC Aiken, she has sent her SAT scores to several Mexican universities — just in case.