Border university's student leader joins generation in limbo

By Lynn Brezosky
lbrezosky@express-news.net
Updated 07:58 p.m., Tuesday, May 24, 2011

BROWNSVILLE — When University of Texas-Brownsville student government association president Jose Arturo Guerra, 21, faces an immigration judge Wednesday, he'll be hoping his lawyer can buy him time to graduate.

Chances are just as likely he'll find himself with a one-way ticket out of the country, to Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, where he has a father living somewhere with a wife and family he barely knows.

But Guerra's striving for degrees in management and international business — and the sentiment that has spurred some in Congress to push several failed versions of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act — might work in his favor.

In a pattern noted and decried by congressional Republicans as a de facto amnesty, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has refrained from deporting high-achieving students to birth countries they barely know.

Those who oppose the DREAM Act, which would give students brought to the United States illegally as children a path to citizenship, say Guerra falls into a gray area that should give its proponents pause. He was 15 the last time he snuck across the border, not an infant or toddler.

And even some who support the measure say dropping or delaying cases only keeps the students in limbo.

“They can be removed at any time,â€