http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050 ... -6540r.htm

Alien still hopes for Dream Act
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
July 5, 2005

While Americans celebrated the 229th birthday of the nation, a young woman in Missouri spent a solemn evening with her parents, perhaps the last for a long while.
Marie Gonzalez, 19, will have the opportunity to remain in the United States for one more year, but her parents, Marvin and Marina Gonzalez, who illegally entered the country with their daughter in 1991, are being deported to Costa Rica today.
"I am greatly happy to stay in the country, my country, but ... I need my parents," Miss Gonzalez said a day after her deportation order was delayed. Her parents will be barred from entering the U.S. for two years.
Last year, she graduated from Helias High School in Jefferson City, Mo., and was planning to attend Lindenwood University in St. Charles before the deportation order.
Miss Gonzalez has spent the past year lobbying Congress to pass the Dream Act, which would allow her to earn her citizenship by completing two years of college.
Sen. Jim Talent, Missouri Republican, was willing to help her by sending letters to the Department of Homeland Security requesting help for the family including deferred action, but he said her status as an illegal alien cannot be ignored.
"Sen. Talent is very sympathetic on a personal level with the Gonzalez family, and especially Marie Gonzalez, but the inescapable fact is that they ... entered the United States illegally," said Talent spokesman Rich Chrismer.
The Dream Act would grant a six-year grace period for illegal aliens who grew up in the United States and graduated from a U.S. high school. During that time, they would be exempt from deportation. If they finished two years of college or served two years in the military, they could earn permanent legal residence in the United States.
"The real tragic thing is, of course, that you have these children who had nothing to do with coming here and breaking the law in the first place and are some of our brightest students, and down the line they get sent back," said Rep. Chris Cannon, Utah Republican, who introduced a House version of the bill in the past.
Mr. Cannon had been gaining support for the Dream Act, but this year immigration enforcement became the higher priority and Congress is looking for a comprehensive solution.
"And that has sort of left these other bills in the wake," Mr. Cannon said.
President Bush proposed a plan two years ago that included an unspecified increase in legal immigration, through a guest-worker program, which would allow illegal aliens now in the United States and applicants elsewhere to fill slots U.S. companies can't fill with American workers. The guest-worker visa would be temporary but renewable an unspecified number of times.
Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill balked at the president's plan, calling it an amnesty program for the estimated 12 million or more illegal aliens in the country, and