KSMODA in the Kansas City Star

It wasn’t so long ago that Yahaira Carrillo wished for invisibility.

Stopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, say, for Pepsi and chips, she would get in and out as quickly and quietly as possible. If a law officer had stopped, too, for a cup of coffee, Carrillo would tense up, fearful somehow her secret would be discovered.

She’s undocumented. No papers, no legal status.

Now the 25-year-old Kansas City woman has shed her anonymity. When Tucson, Ariz., police came to arrest her in mid-May, she showed no fear.

She and others wanted attention for their sit-in, wearing symbolic graduation caps and gowns, inside the office of Sen. John McCain.

The cause of Carrillo and others like her at Kansas City area colleges is proposed federal legislation known as the DREAM Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors.

It would allow undocumented students to legally stay and study in the U.S. temporarily and eventually, if they met mandated conditions, obtain permanent status.

At a time when illegal immigration is a highly charged issue, driving many foreigners without papers into hiding or back to their home nations, these students shrug at the risk of jail and deportation back to countries they may never even have known.

Their purpose is to pave the way to a better life for others brought here as babies or children knowing no other life than an American one.

“I’m an American, that’s what I think,” Carrillo said. “I just don’t have the citizenship or status to prove it, you know.”

Many disagree. They argue that parents broke the law when they illegally crossed the border into the U.S. with their children and neither deserves preferential treatment.

The DREAM Act is just a piece of the larger effort to grant a huge undocumented population amnesty, they said, which will just encourage more people to cross illegally.

“The DREAM Act is saying, ‘Don’t break our law and come here illegally. But if you do, there’s a green card for your

kids,’ ” said Ira Mehlman at the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which opposes the bill.

“No question these kids are in a difficult situation, many of them,” Mehlman said. “This is a situation of their parents’ creation, but if people break the law, they have to understand there are likely going to be consequences for their kids.”

Carrillo, who spent the night on a hard plastic bench in a Tucson jail, faces the possibility of deportation after her civil disobedience arrest. Last month she had her second meeting with immigration officials.

“I was told all the time: ‘Don’t risk this, don’t risk that, because there’s so much on the line,’ ” she said. “Sometimes you have to make your own stand.”

•••

Carrillo. Ricardo Quiñones. Diana Martinez. Myrna Orozco.

They are today’s “dreamers,” local names and faces from a mix of nationalities, immersed in what many regard as the human rights movement of their generation.

Proud to reveal their names and status in the face of those who wish them expelled from the United States, they said they hoped to change the image most people had of an illegal immigrant, and, if they could, to mute the ugly rhetoric they heard.

They march and protest with signs declaring “Stop Lying About Immigrants” and “Undocumented and Unafraid.”

“I see them out in front in the human and civil rights tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Rick Behrens, co-pastor of Grandview Park Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, Kan. “They are taking action not only for themselves, but they realize how many thousands in Kansas City are coming up just like them.”

According to the College Board, which promotes increased college access, 2 million children in the United States are undocumented. At least 65,000 graduate annually from high schools. Because many come from low-income families and are barred from government aid, only 5 to 10 percent pursue a college degree.

What the dreamers want is a chance at a college education — then a legal job and a profession. Raised on Sesame Street and MTV, they often grew up without a clue of why their parents worried about “papers,” which they don’t have.

Most don’t care to discuss their parents’ status. This is their generation’s fight.

“They crossed the border because they wanted to give me a better life,” said Martinez. “It is what any parent would do for their child.”

A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteed a public education through high school for all children, including those of undocumented people. Denying early education would punish children for the actions of their parents.

But it said nothing about an education after high school.

“There is this whole generation of folks that have grown up here facing a brick wall,” said Jessica Piedra, an attorney on the board of the Missouri Immigrant Refugee Advocates.

“There is no path for these kids. They are stuck.”

When legislators first proposed the bipartisan DREAM Act in 2001, opponents came out in full force. Nine years later, opposition remains strong.

“We’re not treating all immigrants equally,” said Missouri Rep. Jerry Nolte, a Republican from Gladstone. “We are giving preferential treatment to those who came illegally.”

•••

Years ago, undocumented young people flocked to forums on the website DREAM Act Portal, where they learned they were not alone. They read about struggles like theirs and found answers, such as which states would let them enroll in college.

“A lot of people who navigated and spearheaded this movement met online,” said Juan Escalante, a college student in Florida who now helps run www.thedreamiscoming.com. “We can’t travel, don’t have money. … We used the Internet.”

But many students moved from behind their computers in 2007 when the DREAM Act fell eight votes short in the Senate.

“We all came to realization we needed to bring this to a higher level,” Escalante said.

On March 10, 100,000 supporters of the DREAM Act marched through Chicago for a national “coming out of the shadows rally.” The march showed the spectrum of the movement. Students from Iran, Central America and Asia stood

alongside American-born youths who had embraced the cause.

Erin Fleming’s red hair and freckles stood out in the midst of the Chicago crowd. The University of Kansas law student got involved in immigration issues two years ago.

“One lady looked at me at a rally and said, ‘You are not even Mexican,’ ” said Fleming, 22, a descendant of Irish immigrants. “Immigrants come from all types of countries — Africa, Asia and Europe. I love America. That is why I

fight to maintain her image as the land of opportunity.”

She admits it’s easier when you don’t face deportation.

For those who do, the movement has become a calling.

•••

Ricardo Quiñones came to the DREAM movement through Carrillo. He’s 20 and a junior psychology major at KU.

Two months after Carrillo and four others sat in protest at McCain’s office, Quiñones was with nearly two dozen students at a similar protest in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington.

It wasn’t the first time he found himself pleading for what to him is a freedom.

Five years ago, he stood before his parents in their Belton home crying and not understanding why they wouldn’t let him get his driver’s license.

“I promise to always be a careful driver,” he pledged. “I have kept my promise. I’ve been a good son. I am a good student. I work hard and I have good grades and I don’t get into trouble.”

What Quiñones learned that day flipped his young world upside down.

“They said, ‘We love you for being a good son, but we can’t help you. You are undocumented.’ ”

Quiñones’s parents brought him here when he was 6 months old. He had stopped eating, and doctors in Mexico could

not determine why.

“They told my parents I would not live long.”

U.S. doctors discovered his lactose intolerance in a week.

Now he’s the only one in his family without legal status. His siblings are U.S.-born. His parents petitioned and received

legal residence.

Without citizenship, he said, he’ll never be able to legally use the degree for which his parents are working hard to fund.

“That’s why I put the DREAM Act first in my life,” Quiñones said. “I don’t know what my tomorrow will be.”

•••

Quiñones wants to be a psychologist, Martinez an environmental scientist, Carrillo a teacher or social worker.

And Myrna Orozco has dreams of being a lawyer.

Just look at these kids, said Behrens of Grandview Park Presbyterian. Look at the effect they could have on America.

Many graduate in the top of their class.

“People don’t realize the incredible potential and what we’re wasting by not taking advantage of what they have to contribute to our society,” said Behrens.

Jessica Piedra, a local civil rights attorney, agreed.

“We’ve already paid to educate them here,” Piedra said, referring to elementary and high school. “So they might as well stay here and contribute here. It doesn’t make sense to use our deportation dollars to deport valedictorians.”

Through middle school, Orozco aced every class and got involved in a host of school activities.

“I don’t want to say I was a teacher’s pet, but I was.”

She had planned her life out: Work hard through high school, get scholarships to a top university, then law school.

Looking back, the 20-year-old Donnelly College political science major said becoming a high school dropout was the furthest thing from her mind.

But that is exactly what happened.

Freshman year at her Raytown high school, she began researching college admission.

“That’s when I found out that at the schools I wanted to attend — Washington University, University of Michigan, the University of Missouri — I needed a government I.D. to enroll,” Orozco said.

She also learned the undocumented get no state or federal student aid.

That’s when she thought to herself: “Why am I doing this?”

Her grades dropped, A’s to F’s.

“I got really depressed, and finally I just quit,” she said.

When she discovered the DREAM Act and how young undocumented college students were speaking out, she said, it gave her hope.

“I thought if they can do it, I can too. I got my act together with my grades and started getting involved again. I worked my butt off to remake my life.”

At the Winnetonka High School graduation, she gave the commencement address.

She’s lived in the U.S. since 4, when her mother fled the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez in 1994. Hundreds of young women mysteriously were being murdered along the border. She said two aunts were among the victims.

She gave little thought to being an illegal, until the attacks of Sept. 11.

“I’m a patriot,” Orozco said. “I watched the attack in horror, too. I wrote letters to the soldiers and prayed for their safety. The feelings of patriotism grew strong inside me, that this is my home, a country I would easily go fight for, die to protect freedom.

“Freedom I didn’t even have.”

•••

As Carrillo ate lunch in Westport last week, she talked about the long road ahead. Some days, working odd jobs babysitting, interpreting and housecleaning to pay for school, she gets discouraged.

Many American-born friends with whom she graduated from Ruskin High in 2003 have their college degrees by now.

“Life keeps going on for everybody, and they’re becoming the professionals they wanted to be,” said Carrillo, who graduated in the top 10 percent.

“Granted, you know, nobody’s life is perfect, but at some point I’m going to get really sick and tired of going to school.”

By the time she gets her bachelor’s degree, she’ll have nine years invested at local colleges. She has her associate degree from Donnelly College and hopes to get a bachelor’s from Rockhurst University in 2012.

The Obama administration has said criminal illegals and fugitives — not college students — should be the target for

deportation. But since the Tucson arrest, Carrillo has found herself in that process.

She knows she could be sent back to a country she doesn’t really know. She speaks the language, but only because she’s majoring in Spanish. For years she has worked hard to speak, read and write the language of her parents.

Carrillo is where she wants to be. When traveling for a few months recently, she felt that pang of homesickness, eager to get back to Kansas City.

“This is home,” she said. “I’m willing to put everything on the line to stay here. And I have.”