Thread: Deported State Championship Coach's Sob Story

Liberty + Justice
Miquel Aparicio and Carlos Borja aren't just cross-country coaches. After immigrating to the States, they created a program out of thin air at one of the toughest high schools in Phoenix. They have lived out the American Dream. Or so it seemed. By John Brant Image by Shea Roggio From the September 2010 issue of Runner's World

On an April afternoon in 2009, a mile off Interstate 10 in Casa Grande, Arizona, Miguel Aparicio, coach of the state champion Alhambra High School boys cross-country team in Phoenix, pulled his tan Silverado pickup into a Circle K convenience store for coffee. He filled his cup, paid at the register, and moved to the door just as a uniformed agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) walked in. Aparicio felt a jolt of anxiety. Since a statewide crackdown on illegal immigrants had begun a few years earlier, many Hispanics in Arizona felt uneasy in the presence of law enforcement. The agent saw Aparicio carrying the cup and held the door open. He looked the agent in the eye, smiled, and said thank you in English.

Aparicio, who earned his living as a journeyman electrician, climbed behind the wheel of his truck and drove into town. He was here, 40 miles south of Phoenix, to install a ceiling fan at a friend's house. Aparicio continued two miles along Casa Grande Street and turned right onto Cottonwood Lane. Talking with his 19-year-old helper, Carlos Mendez, a member of Alhambra's 2007 state champion team, and intent on finding his friend's house, Aparicio didn't see the unmarked sheriffs' department patrol car trailing him until the deputy popped on his misery lights.

At first he was more perplexed than alarmed. Even Joe Arpaio, the notoriously hard-line sheriff of neighboring Maricopa County, needed a reason to stop motorists during his sweeps of Hispanic Phoenix neighborhoods. Aparicio felt certain that he'd committed no traffic violation. But he recalled the ICE agent back at the Circle K and imagined how he must have appeared: a Mexican-looking stranger wearing work clothes, driving a late model Silverado full of expensive tools. He assumed the agent had tipped off the deputy, who now stood beside Aparicio's truck.

The deputy said something about a school zone. Aparicio did not bother arguing. The deputy asked him for his driver's license, and Aparicio said that he didn't have one. The deputy asked for Mendez's ID and got the same answer. The deputy remained calm and businesslike. Aparicio was calm, too. Now that the moment he'd dreaded for years had finally arrived, he almost felt relieved.

Aparicio and Mendez sat on a low brick retaining wall in front of a stucco house, waiting as the deputy called ICE. There was a 7-Eleven across the street, and customers gawked at them from the parking lot. Aparicio's calm gave way—first to humiliation, then regret. The day before, Carlos Borja, his best friend and coaching partner at Alhambra High, had warned him not to make this trip. Aparicio realized that the deputy had not yet confiscated his cell phone. He called his brother in Scottsdale and then his friend here in Casa Grande. Finally he texted Jorge Martinez, a sophomore at Alhambra and the 2008 5-A individual state cross-country champion: Pulled over by sheriffs ice coming.

Jorge texted back, You're joking, right?

This was no joke. An ICE van arrived and an agent, a different one than at Circle K, ran Aparicio's fingerprints through a computer. Though that didn't raise a red flag, Aparicio didn't contest that he was one of an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. Thus began one of the roughly 400 immigration-related arrests recorded each month in Pinal County.

The agent spoke slowly and distinctly, as if his detainee spoke limited English. "How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Twenty years," Aparicio replied.

The agent looked at him. "Don't bullshit me. If you start lying, you'll only make it harder on yourself."

"That's the truth," Aparicio said. "Twenty years."

That night ICE officers put Aparicio in a holding room with perhaps a hundred other men. He barely had space to sit, let alone lie down and sleep. The air conditioning was jacked up to Arctic levels, and the guards didn't give out blankets. The next morning, when he was brought in for processing, Aparicio was cold and exhausted. But he was no stranger to discomfort, and he looked forward to stating his case to immigration officials.

Aparicio imagined how he'd explain how he had been a good, hard-working man during his 20 years in the United States. Starting from nothing, he'd attained an education, learned a useful trade, built a top high-school running program, and helped dozens of young Latino men to attend college and embark on careers. Aparicio was no saint—he'd been convicted on a DUI charge in 2002, and had driven without a valid license after that (by that time, Arizona required proof of legal presence and wouldn't reissue him one). But he felt that, on balance, he'd lived an upstanding life that would bear scrutiny. He just needed a judge to hear his story. Sadly, most inmates in the jail, and most of the estimated 12 million unauthorized residents nationwide, had an American story. The government couldn't listen to all of them. Aparicio knew that unless you have an immediate family member who is a citizen or legal resident, your case may already be decided. If ICE catches up with you, odds are you'll be deported.

Aparicio's parents lived in Mexico. His grandmother possessed a green card, an ID that attests to an alien's permanent resident status, but their relationship wasn't close enough. She couldn't save Aparicio from the fact that when he was 15, he'd followed her under the fence in Nogales. And over the ensuing two decades, he'd failed to take the path toward citizenship. For five years, he'd been married to a U.S. citizen, who could have sponsored his application. But Aparicio hadn't followed through.

He says now that he was intimidated by practical obstacles—big expenses and endless red tape—and afraid of the unknown. For an illegal immigrant like Aparicio, any contact with the establishment can be dicey. An official might find something in your file, say a fabricated Social Security number, and instead of processing your request for a green card, that official might send you to ICE. "If you don't have documents, the system isn't your friend," Aparicio says. "You've made it for this long in America, you think, so why change now? Why call attention to yourself?"

As he stood in the processing room, Aparicio considered his options. Instead of requesting an appeal, he could cut his losses and sign a voluntary return, one of the first options presented to ICE detainees who aren't evaluated as risks to the American public. By agreeing to it, Aparicio would forfeit the right to hearings and appeals, and commit to vacate U.S. soil within 120 days. But in return, instead of spending weeks or months in ICE custody while his case ran its course, he'd be released quickly. He could be out of jail and back with his runners by the following day.

Miguel Aparicio lived for his coaching, which he performed on a volunteer basis and subsidized out of his own pocket. Every year he bought the team new uniforms and each summer rented a cabin for a two-week preseason training camp in the mountains near Flagstaff. He also spent heavily on gas, driving the boys home after practice, and to the movies and other outings on weekends and vacations. He racked up these bills without complaint because the team formed his family. The seven boys and their two coaches had stuck together through withering summer training and the highs and lows of the state championships.

Aparicio and Borja had also taught the Alhambra boys about some bedrock American values. They coached their athletes to never quit a race, even if it appeared lost, and to believe that honesty and hard work would always be rewarded. Aparicio recalled Jorge Martinez flying down the stretch at the previous season's state championship meet to win the individual title as a sophomore. He remembered team training runs where he and the boys had run to the top of a mountain, then turned around, run to the bottom, and climbed the peak again. These runs were lessons in endurance and determination.

So what would Aparicio say to the Alhambra boys if he saw them the next day in Phoenix? He'd have to tell them that he had signed a piece of paper that granted him freedom but denied him a chance, however slim, to tell his story. Wasn't it their story, too? Then Aparicio would have to report that he'd surrendered without a struggle; that he had declined to even try to make a case that the United States of America was his rightful home.

Aparicio declined the offer of voluntary return. He wasn't ready to give up. The guard led him back to lockup.


In August 1988, Faridodin "Fredi" Lajvardi, a 23-year-old native of Iran and a recent graduate of Arizona State University, began teaching science and coaching cross-country and track at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix. Hayden was at least 90 percent Hispanic; Lajvardi estimates that 40 to 80 percent of the students were undocumented (the school district did not track the statistic). There was no doubt that Hayden sat in one of the poorest, roughest neighborhoods of Phoenix. After his first day as a coach, Lajvardi walked out to his car to find the windows smashed and his wallet stolen.

The young teacher was undaunted. A three-time Boston Marathon qualifier with a 2:48 PR, Lajvardi was especially excited to coach. He knew he needed a student to lead his fledgling program, an athlete who'd be willing to put in the work and demand the best from himself and his teammates. Lajvardi recruited a freshman on the football team, a scowling, barrel-chested boy named Carlos Borja. "The first thing you noticed about Carlos was his toughness," Lajvardi says. "The other boys respected him, and were also a little afraid of him. But as you got to know Carlos, you realized that the aggressive demeanor was a facade, a way to mask his intelligence and compassion. The way Carlos had come up, he couldn't let himself appear vulnerable."

Borja, whose mother had died when he was 4, started working in the sugarcane fields of his native state of Colima in western Mexico at age 6. The work followed a changeless rhythm. "Burn the fields, cut the cane, stack it into piles four feet high," Borja recalls. "I got paid five pesos a pile." He attended school on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.

When he was 10, one of his older brothers, who'd been working in Arizona with his father, returned to bring Carlos and his sisters to the United States. His brother hired a coyote for $100. The children scrambled under the fence in Nogales and traveled on to Phoenix. Borja was sent to live with his brother, who worked for a tree-service company. Adjusting to his new home proved difficult. One brother dropped out of high school. A sister got pregnant twice in high school and had two babies. A similar fate seemed to await Carlos Borja, but then he discovered sports.

He loved being active; he loved competing; he loved to win. He excelled in football, basketball, and soccer, but gave them all up when Lajvardi introduced him to distance running. "What hooked me on running was the chance it gave you to win," Borja says. "It was a team sport, but at the same time, it was up to the individual. You could train and compete as hard as you wanted. There was nobody holding you back but yourself."

Borja emerged as Hayden's top runner, and the team quickly responded to Lajvardi's system, which combined demanding training with a close family atmosphere. The coach hosted team dinners at his home. He talked about college, paid for shoes and insurance, and got to know the runners' parents. Within two years, Hayden's cross-country team had qualified for the Arizona state championship. "We'd hold team meetings, and I'd ask each boy, 'Why are you here?'" Lajvardi says. "We would analyze motivation and strategy. We used to have some amazing discussions, and Carlos always had the deepest insights. A possible future teacher and coach was taking shape right in front of my eyes."

In Lajvardi's second season at Hayden, a boy named Miguel Aparicio turned out for cross-country. "Miguel was unusual in a couple of ways," Lajvardi says. "You could tell that, even by Hayden standards, he came from an extremely impoverished background. The second thing was his eagerness to please. I never saw a kid more attuned to the needs of others than Miguel."

While Borja's gruff exterior shielded a vulnerable core, Aparicio's gentleness sheathed a steely resolve. After just a few weeks of training, he earned a varsity spot in the season's first cross-country meet, which took place on a 110-degree afternoon. Instead of running conservatively, as Lajvardi had advised, Aparicio redlined the race. At the finish he collapsed into the arms of an assistant coach on the cross-country team. He was rushed to a temporary emergency center at the meet, where he was diagnosed with heatstroke. "Miguel nearly killed himself," Lajvardi says, "because he didn't want to disappoint his teammates or me."

Just as Borja's toughness was a product of his difficult background, Aparicio's hunger for acceptance arose from his hard past. Tucked away in a remote village in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico's central highlands, Aparicio's home lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Since age 7 he'd worked in the fields, picking soybeans and melons. On February 17, 1990—a date he recalls as clearly as his birthday—his grandmother, who cleaned houses in Phoenix, came to bring the 15-year-old to America. They rode a bus 12 hours north to Nogales, which sits right at the Arizona border.

His grandmother paid a coyote $300. That man took them to the border—then an unimposing chain-link fence—where they waited for nightfall. Then, as the U.S. Border Patrol began changing shifts, the coyote gave them a sign and they crawled through a hole beneath the fence. They hustled across the parking lot of a McDonald's, whose lights glowed ghostly in the fog, a wetback version of Lady Liberty, welcoming the boy to America.

At first Aparicio lived with his grandmother, who had a room in the house of the family she worked for. He didn't know any English, and basic comforts such as hot running water and TV seemed like marvels. He rode a bus to South Mountain High School in one of the hardest parts of Phoenix. The school's blacks and Mexicans were at war, and Aparicio had to fight every day.

As his grandmother moved among sub-minimum-wage cleaning jobs, he had to fend for himself, and for a time Aparicio was essentially homeless. He slept on couches and floors, in garages and tool sheds. His dinner often consisted of discarded food scavenged from the school cafeteria. He worked at any job he could find, learning scraps of English and doing his homework in the moments he could spare. But when Aparicio turned 16 and transferred to Hayden, his luck seemed to turn as well. "Miguel threw himself into running," says Denise Jackson, a former science teacher at Hayden who helped out the cross-country team. "He loved being with the other boys, which made his separation from them all the more poignant. At the end of practice, the team would come running across the fields to the track. The other boys would head for the locker room, but not Miguel. He would keep running right past the school to the parking lot, where a truck was waiting for him. He'd jump in the truck in his running clothes and go to work all night laying tile."

While he'd found his surrogate family, Aparicio retained an outsider's empathy. During his junior track season, the team competed in a major relay meet. Lajvardi had a strict rule about relays: Squads were always made up of the four athletes with the fastest times in the event. Late in the meet, Aparicio, who'd already won two medals, offered to give up his place on a third relay to a teammate who hadn't qualified for any of the races.

Miguel was pretty disappointed when I told him no," Lajvardi says. "Carlos also felt for the guy who was left out, but his reaction was to go to the kid and tell him to earn the position next time. Miguel's reaction was to sacrifice himself. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the difference between Miguel and Carlos."

Their differences, however, were overshadowed by their shared passion to succeed. During their senior year, Carl Hayden finished fourth in the state meet, led by Borja, who finished 16th. The two young men also shared the same original sin: Both had crawled under the border fence at Nogales, and were living in the United States illegally. They became close friends. Aparicio aroused a protective, paternal instinct in Borja, whose strength and self-confidence answered a deep need in Aparicio.

"Miguel was always over at the house that I shared with my older brother," Borja says. "He loved the family atmosphere, even though my mother was dead and I didn't see my father often. One time Miguel took me to where he was staying. It was a falling down shack, in the backyard of a house of a guy he worked for. There was no mattress, no couch, no nothing. It was an awful place. So I told Miguel that he should come live with us. I didn't have much, I didn't have a mother, but I had more than Miguel."


After Aparicio declined to sign the voluntary return, ICE put him on the move, bussing him down to a Tucson facility in the middle of the night. A week or so later, also in the early morning hours, another bus hauled him back north to a processing center in Florence. After another week, Aparicio boarded a bus for yet another postmidnight ride. This one would be short, though, just a mile or so into town, to a long-term ICE lockup that was housed in the Pinal County Adult Detention Center.

Obviously, Aparicio was caught up in a pretty big net. According to an official with ICE, more than half of all arrests of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S. border occur in Arizona. The Arizona ICE district removed 76,000 aliens in 2008, 81,000 aliens in 2009, and is on pace in 2010 to match or exceed these totals.

Against this torrent the U.S. government has erected a 652-mile-long barrier of steel beams and concrete stretching from Texas to California, augmented by motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft , and sniffer dogs. The U.S. government spends 84 percent of its multi-million-dollar budget designated for border-related crime on Southwest border states alone. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security has tripled the number of ICE intelligence officers and quadrupled the deployment of Border Liaison officers. In Pinal County, less than 100 miles north of Mexico, border enforcement has helped make incarceration the top industry. ICE maintains a cluster of facilities in Florence and operates a 1,500-bed detention center, one of the agency's largest lockups nationwide, in Eloy. The structures sprout massively from the desert badlands, resembling the alien starships that Aparicio, a science-fiction movie fan, sometimes drew to fill the empty hours in jail.

The bus rolled into the night. ICE hustled you around at this hour, Aparicio speculated, to spare locals and tourists the disturbing sight. Or maybe detainees were moved in the small hours because they didn't sleep much anyway. With no outside air and almost no exercise of any kind, let alone the running that Aparicio lived for, sleep did not come easily.

He saw a splash of stars, the shape of mountains in the distance. He wished this ride could go on for a long time, but after only a few minutes, the bus turned into the county jail complex. Aparicio was startled to see a McDonald's situated at the entrance to the prison. Even at this hour, the drive-thru remained open. Amid the desert darkness, the lights of the restaurant burned like a second moon.

Aparicio remembered the night he had first come to America. He recalled taking his grandmother's hand and scrambling under the fence. He remembered the McDonald's lights glowing ghostly in the fog, welcoming him to America. And now 20 years later, the Golden Arches were ushering him out.

Aparicio stared into the night. The glow of the franchise rainbow faded and the bulk of the prison loomed, framed by the stars.

Upon graduating from Hayden in 1992, Aparicio and Borja both dreamed to emulate Lajvardi's teaching and coaching career. Aparicio chipped away at college for a few years, pooling small private scholarships with money earned from his manual work; but lacking papers, he was ineligible for state or federal financial aid. He eventually abandoned his teaching ambitions and became a journeyman electrician, going through training at a community college. But his dream to coach never died.

In 1997, he began volunteering as a running coach at Phoenix high schools. In 2003, Aparicio took over the program at Alhambra, whose largely poor, Hispanic, and undocumented student body resembled that of Carl Hayden's. The next year, Borja accepted Aparicio's offer to join him as a coach at Alhambra.

Borja had spent a decade working hard to build a life. After completing his first year at Yavapai College north of Phoenix, Borja had learned that Danielle, his girlfriend, was pregnant. The couple married, and Borja shifted his focus from going to school and running to working and taking care of his new family, which now included a baby boy. He also got serious about citizenship. Danielle was a U.S. citizen, a fourth-generation Mexican-American. Acting as his sponsor, she made certain that Borja filed his paperwork and met his deadlines. He became a legal resident in 1994, which allowed him to receive state and federal financial aid and continue taking college classes. Still, a nine-year grind ensued, with Borja taking every part-time job he could find, from installing tile to working in the college library. In 1999, at a ceremony in Phoenix, Carlos Borja became a U.S. citizen. That same year, he earned a bachelor's degree from ASU and took a job as a math teacher at Smith Middle School in the poor West Phoenix neighborhood where he'd grown up. Borja knew the convenience stores and vacant lots where his students hung out and understood the pull of gangs and drugs. He understood that they had nowhere to go after school but home or, more often, the streets.

Borja offered an alternative: Stay at school and play sports. Play soccer and basketball or run laps around the playground. Borja would stage races and make running fun for everybody, regardless of ability, while at the same time scouting talent for the team at Alhambra. The eighth-graders ran hard for their favorite teacher because they wanted to please him, but they were also hungry to be chosen. Borja tended to pick the toughest and wildest boys, the kind of kid he'd been as a teenager. He and Aparicio could channel that wildness and, over time, produce a champion.

While still in middle school, the chosen ones—Jorge Martinez, Ignacio Villalba, Sergio Sanchez, and Samuel Dominguez—began training with the two coaches. Because he was a certified teacher, Borja held the title of head coach, but the two men shared duties equally. Though Aparicio generally played the role of good cop, and Borja the stern authority figure, Aparicio occasionally displayed a ferocious side. He would take the boys to the mountains for punishing workouts. He'd run along with them, shouting and sputtering, out of his mind with effort and love and the desperation born of 20 years living in the shadowed half of America. His aim in life was to offer these boys the same purchase in America that, years earlier, Lajvardi had supplied to him.

By the time they enrolled as freshmen at Alhambra in the fall of 2007, the four boys formed the core of a nascent prep powerhouse. Alhambra won the 2007 large-school cross-country state championship and fell just two points short of repeating in 2008. Martinez was developing into a national-class talent with a chance to win three consecutive individual state cross-country titles, a feat accomplished just once before in Arizona history. And the team was determined to reclaim the state title in 2009.

"The secret of Carlos and Miguel's success is that there is no secret," says David Cruickshank, the cross-country coach at South Mountain High School in Phoenix and a member of the Arizona Coaches Association High School Coaches Hall of Fame. "They put in the time with their kids. The importance of that time is incalculable for the school and the city's Hispanic community. Miguel and Carlos are talented coaches and dedicated men who come from the same background as their runners. They've had the same struggles as those kids. They speak the same language, in all senses of the term."



Aparicio settled to his time in the sprawling, earth-tone-painted jail. He shared a stark dormitory room with nine other detainees. During the day, they watched TV or played cards. There was no privacy or natural light, just boredom and too much time to think. "I started to think that maybe I belonged in jail," Aparicio says. "Maybe I really am a criminal."

In the eyes of many, of course, his guilt is beyond question. During the previous decade, anti-illegal-immigration anger had built across Arizona, provoked by economic recession, a Mexican drug war, and a polarized political climate. The movement is led by populist figures such as Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff , and Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored Senate Bill 1070, which makes it a state crime for aliens to be in Arizona without registration documents and "allows" local law enforcement officers to determine a person's immigration status during "lawful contact," provisions that critics argued would lead to racial profiling. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill into law on April 23, 2010, igniting a nationwide controversy.

Pearce's Web site offers his credo: "Simply enforce our existing immigration laws and you will see less crime, lower taxes, smaller class sizes, shorter lines in our emergency rooms, and reduced deaths, murders, maimings, drugs, home invasions, car-jackings, kidnappings, jobs taken from Americans, reduced wages, and ultimately save the taxpayer the billions of dollars it costs to educate, medicate, and incarcerate illegal immigrants [sic]."

Other Arizonans regard the issue in a more conflicted light. "I'm a second-generation Mexican-American whose mother attained citizenship the hard way, standing in line and filling out the forms," says Mary Lou Herrera, president of the Thunder Mountain Running Club in southern Arizona. "But beyond that, I also live six or seven miles from the border. Once, when my husband was away on National Guard duty and I was alone in the house with my daughter, I woke to find someone walking around in my bedroom. And members of our club who do cleanup on the highway find a lot of Mexican newspapers and other litter left by illegal immigrants." Herrera pauses. "Look, I'm a public-school PE teacher and coach. I've mentored scores of kids from Mexico who've been brought to the United States through no fault of their own, and my heart goes out to them. But in the end, I have mixed feelings about 1070. I'm willing to be stopped for driving while Mexican if it means my family will be safer."

Such was the troubled and divided highway that delivered Miguel Aparicio to the Pinal County Adult Detention Center. Word of his plight reached his friends, and Denise Jackson, former teacher at Alhambra and team supporter, paid to retain Jesse Westover, a Mesa-based immigration attorney. Friends came to visit, although Aparicio could only greet them over closed-circuit TV. But the hardest thing by far was the confinement.

Aparicio equated America with movement. Except to sleep, he was almost never at the modest Scottsdale condo he shared with his grandmother and brother. He would leave at 5 in the morning to go to his job site. He'd usually finish work by 2 p.m., then drive to the Alhambra campus in West Phoenix. If he got there before school was dismissed, he'd let himself into the track with a key that the maintenance staff had given him. He'd change into shorts and running shoes and knock out a few miles, training to run with the boys in the mountains, to lead them on the searing climbs that made champions.

After practice, as the desert sun was setting, Borja would go home to his wife and three children. Aparicio, who had no immediate family waiting for him, would pile the boys in his truck and deliver them to their homes scattered around West Phoenix. He drove them because it would take too long on the bus and because he liked hanging out with the boys. They were his friends, his little brothers, his family. When he delivered the last boy to his home, that boy's mother would invariably insist that Aparicio stay for dinner. After dinner and visiting, he would make the 40-minute drive back to Scottsdale, where he'd collapse into bed, exhausted and happy.

Finally in late June, seven weeks after Aparicio's arrest, Denise Jackson paid the $5,000 bail that secured Aparicio's release. Aparicio was no longer detained, yet he was hardly free. He faced multiple immigration-court dates and an uphill climb to even get a chance to prove that he deserved to stay in America.

His friends rallied around him. The coaches he'd worked with and competed against wrote letters testifying to his character. His boss at the electrical company wrote a letter. Danielle Borja, Carlos' wife, who is also a teacher, wrote a letter. Some of his former runners, the ones who'd won scholarships and attained college degrees, families, and careers, these young men wrote letters.

Westover, however, wasn't optimistic. Despite all of his virtues and accomplishments, Aparicio lacks the golden thread—a legal immediate family member—that binds him to the United States. The best the attorney could do for his client was buy time. Eventually the legal process would play out to an anticlimactic end. Instead of a rousing Hollywood-style closing argument, with an eloquent account of Aparicio's American story, the finale would likely be a dry legal exchange between a lawyer and judge. And then it would finally be time for Aparicio to go back to Mexico.

"Ironically, Miguel has to suffer for his responsibility," says Jackson. "He hasn't gone around promiscuously fathering children at the taxpayers' expense, and now he doesn't have a child to use as a bargaining chip with ICE. He's a disciplined, hardworking, generous man who doesn't expect handouts, and whose only 'crime' was being brought to this country as a boy, when he didn't have a choice in the matter. America ought to be welcoming a man like Miguel Aparicio with open arms. Instead, for some perverse, unfathomable reason, we're persecuting him."


Friday is test day in Room 30 of Smith Middle School. Between second and third periods, the kids boil through the hall, but they quiet down when they see Borja standing in the doorway with his default scowl. One of the lowest-income middle schools in Phoenix, Smith sits across the street from a shantytown-like trailer park, first stop for the poorest paperless migrants just up from the border. The school can chew up teachers, but classroom order, Borja says, has never been a problem for him. "I get offers to go into administration, and suburban high schools have approached me to come teach and coach for them, but I always tell them no thanks," Borja says, as the kids settle to a math test. "I love this age, this population, and this work. This is where I belong."

There are good teachers who never talk about themselves and good teachers who make a point of doing so. Borja is the latter. He tells the kids stories of his boyhood. He talks about his passion for the Los Angeles Lakers. He brings in his cross-country stars to visit and run with the kids, to demonstrate that Jorge Martinez came from the same background as them. "If Jorge can make himself into a state champion," Borja says, "then they have an equal right to their dreams."

There is also an egotistical streak to Borja's style, a truculence that unsettled his teammates back in high school and that has surfaced throughout his career. "Carlos comes from the old Mexican tradition in which a man always stands up for his principles," David Cruickshank says. "That can make him seem stubborn and threatening, and some people find him difficult to work with. He has a very strong personality—strong in a good way. He'll go to battle for his kids, his friends, and the things that he believes in."

Last summer, Borja's defining battle began quietly. "By the time Miguel got out of detention, it was almost July," he says. "Right away he informed Mr. [Lorenzo] Cabrera, the Alhambra athletic director, about his arrest. We heard nothing from the AD for weeks, and we thought that Miguel's immigration problem wasn't an issue with the school district. So Miguel and I went ahead, coaching together like usual."

But in October, Borja says, as the team began ramping up for late-season meets, the AD called him into his office. "He told me that Miguel had to stop coaching immediately. And not only that, he also had to cut off all contact with the boys. He couldn't drive them home, or take them on a weekend run, or visit their families. How was that possible? Miguel had passed a million background checks. He'd been coaching for eight years at Alhambra—eight years! And now suddenly he couldn't even contact the runners? These boys are our family. The administration says Miguel can't see his family?"

The AD, according to Borja, cited a list of concerns. (The athletic director declined to be interviewed for this story.) Due to his immigration status, Aparicio would flunk a new background check; the team could be disqualified for having an uncertified coach. If the school permitted an illegal immigrant to fill an official position, it could be sued or otherwise penalized. There were also liability and safety issues.

Borja, characteristically, lost his temper. "I would die before I compromised the safety of my runners!" he told the AD. "Miguel is like a brother to me! And he is a brother to those boys and their mothers and fathers! There has never been a hint of impropriety with Miguel. The families trust him with their sons' lives. So do I."

"You can see how the AD might have lost patience at that point," Cruickshank says. "The school hadn't created this problem. Miguel faced serious legal difficulties. He had spent a lengthy stretch in jail. School officials might have personally disagreed with the immigration laws, but they had to fulfill their professional responsibilities. They could have handled it more gracefully, but they had no choice but to cut Miguel off ."

Borja, for his part, was a veteran public school teacher and coach. He knew how the system worked. Cabrera might have assumed that Borja thought the rules that other teams had to play by no longer applied to Alhambra cross-country. Or maybe the AD heard a streak of bluster in Borja's tone, when in fact it reflected a quality animating the deepest grain of his character.

"Machismo in Mexican Spanish is more akin to the Latin gravitas," Richard Rodriguez observes in his book Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. "The male is serious. The male provides. The Mexican male never abandons those who depend upon him. The male remembers."


The truth is that Borja felt partly responsible for his friend's misfortune. On the day before Aparicio drove to Casa Grande, Borja had gotten a bad feeling that his friend shouldn't make the trip. Why hadn't he been more insistent? And years earlier, while Aparicio was married, why hadn't Borja dogged him harder to apply for citizenship? The crisis forced Borja into a spell of reflection.

"I realized that I'd accomplished everything that I was supposed to in America," he says. "I'd graduated from college, established a profession, married happily, fathered children, and attained citizenship. Miguel failed to achieve any of those things. But I knew I wasn't any better than him."

When he crawled under the border fence a lifetime ago, Borja points out, he had his brother and sisters surrounding him. When Aparicio made his crossing, he was essentially alone. Later, if it hadn't been for Danielle, Borja never would've had the motivation to fill out all the forms and wait in all the lines that it took to become legal. Minus a few lucky breaks, in short, it could have been Carlos, and not Miguel, who went for a drive one day and ended up in jail.

The longer Borja brooded on the situation, the angrier he became. "I felt like I'd pledged myself to the idea of America," he says. "Every day, with all my heart, I taught that idea to my students and my runners. And now America, for some reason, had turned on me. My community was under attack, and my friend had been arrested."

Borja was angry, he was proud, and he remembered. When the Alhambra athletic director offered his own version of a voluntary return—a plea to Borja to make life easier for the institution and himself, to just follow the rules, to let his improvident friend go so that he, who lived on the lawful side of the border, could continue doing such a wonderful job with his runners—Borja had a hard time controlling himself. "I will not tell Miguel that he can no longer see the boys," he told the AD. "If that is what you think must happen, then you tell him."

Borja walked out of the office and carried on with his business. Aparicio continued to coach and mentor the boys, and the team continued to prepare for the upcoming district and state championships.

A few days later, the AD called Borja in again, and repeated his demand. Now Borja's anger had had time to sharpen. "Why?" he demanded. "What has changed? Why was Miguel such an excellent coach for eight years, and now, suddenly, he is dangerous, a threat to the boys' safety, and not to be trusted? What has he done? Has he committed a crime? Has he been caught selling drugs? Has he done anything to frighten or take advantage of the boys? Has he become a terrorist? Does he threaten America?"

Borja left the office and, once again, he and Aparicio continued to coach as usual. "I hoped that somehow it might blow over," Borja says. "I knew I was doing the right thing, but it was still tearing me up. Our season was at stake, and I realized I was burning bridges with the school."

The AD called him in again a few days after that. This time Borja took a quieter approach. His anger was still there, but he knew not to direct it at Cabrera. The AD wasn't the enemy. "Look, I'm a family man," Borja said. "My wife and children come first. The $4,000 I get for coaching cross-country means a lot to us, but I'm willing to give that up, because Miguel is part of my family, too. He is like a brother to me. I will not tell him to go away."

The AD was quiet for a moment. "You give me no easy way out," he said.

Borja felt his stomach sink. "You are also a family man," he said, sounding more confident than he felt. "Do what you must."

The next day the AD met with Borja one more time. He said he had made his decision. Due to repeated insubordination and violation of school-district policy, Carlos Borja could not continue to coach the Alhambra cross-country team.


Alhambra's team unity is on display at a dinner at the home of Jorge Martinez in February 2010. The current runners have gathered, joined by a half-dozen alumni. While a video of the 2007 state championship meet plays in the living area of the small stucco house in West Phoenix, Alma, Jorge's mother, presides over the kitchen. Danielle Borja, Carlos's wife, along with several other mothers, wives, and sisters, sets the table and prepares dishes. They are joined by Aparicio, who, clearly in his element, waves a towel and cracks jokes in Spanish as he stacks homemade tortillas on a plate.

Borja, meanwhile, sits on the sofa with a benevolent but cool smile. "I always keep a little bit of distance from the boys," he says quietly. "So that when I talk, they listen."

Over dinner, Alejandro Caro, Jorge's stepfather, explains how the two coaches have affected a transformation in Jorge. "Before he started running, he was a disobedient boy who got in fights and never did his homework," he says. "But once he started training with Coach Carlos and Coach Miguel, he made a 180-degree turn."

As other parents share similar stories, the boys—Jorge, Ignacio, Sergio, Sammy—look down shyly at their plates. Their younger brothers and sisters eat quickly and go outside to play. Heaping platters of enchiladas appear from the kitchen; more former runners arrive from college classes and jobs. But as the conversation turns to the events of the 2009 season, the room grows quiet.

When Aparicio got out of jail last summer, it seemed for a time that everything had returned to normal. In late July the team traveled to its mountain training camp. The families had to chip in for expenses because Aparicio, who usually paid the rent, had lost significant income while in jail. Otherwise, the camp proceeded as usual—long, hard runs at altitude leavened by cookouts, swimming, and campfires under the stars. Then the runners returned to the city, school, and the start of cross-country season. Lost in the reassuring rhythms, they could almost forget that Aparicio had ever been away.

At the 2008 state meet, Jorge, just a sophomore at the time, had broken away from the lead pack down the stretch to claim the 5-A individual title, but the team had finished second by a few heartbreaking points. The boys resolved to reclaim the title in 2009. By early October, everything seemed to be falling into place. Jorge began emerging as a true leader, focusing on his teammates' performance as well as his own. "The goal was to have our top four guys all run within 40 seconds behind Jorge," Borja explains. "That's the kind of depth that wins state titles."

But abruptly the boys could see the tenor of the season had changed. Coach Carlos got called into Mr. Cabrera's office, and when he came out he looked worried. He would whisper something to Coach Miguel, who looked even more worried. Jorge waited for the trouble to pass, just as he'd waited on that day years earlier when his family crossed over from Mexico. The border guard had studied the ID that belonged to Jorge's cousin, which his parents were passing off as Jorge's own. After a seemingly endless moment of deliberation, the officer had waved the vehicle through. But now, when Jorge looked up, the trouble with his coaches had only deepened. Coach Carlos called a team meeting to explain what had happened. He told the boys not to worry about him. "You have your workout schedule," he said. "You know who you are, and you know what you're after. Everything will work out okay."

The boys believed him. Coach Carlos and Coach Miguel had never let them down. They'd brought the boys to places they never could had imagined. Jorge, especially, was starting to see how far running could take him. He had seen the film Without Limits and dreamed of running like his hero, Steve Prefontaine, from the University of Oregon. Jorge took the lead as the boys continued working out, holding his teammates to the 40-second goal. "The team succeeds because we are one," the coaches repeatedly had told them, so that's what Jorge kept telling himself.

A few days later, the AD called the boys into a meeting. "He said that he would find us another coach," Jorge says. "He told us to carry on as always, and prepare for the district championships."

After the administrator left , the runners huddled. Jorge, Ignacio, Sergio, Sammy: four boys who'd been inseparable friends since eighth grade, when Coach Carlos had chosen them. They had to decide if they were going to run for another coach. That idea seemed unthinkable; Coach Carlos and Coach Miguel were like fathers to the boys. But the alternative seemed even more unthinkable. How could they stop running now, after five hard years together, and when they were so close to their goal? How could Jorge, who had even more to lose than the others—who had a destiny to fulfill—even consider stopping?

The boys looked at one another. As illegals, they constantly had to adjust to the power emanating from the documented side of America. They had learned not to challenge the power. If they were smart and careful and made the proper adjustments, then the sheriff 's deputy wouldn't hassle them. The boys knew this in their bones, but they also possessed a deeper knowledge, inculcated from their first day running as eighth graders. They could depend on one another. The team was a family. Perhaps most important, the boys had role models to guide their conduct. If Coach Miguel had refused to sign the voluntary return, and if Coach Carlos had refused to betray his friend, the boys would refuse to run for another coach.

And with that, the boys declared that they wouldn't run unless Borja was reinstated.

No one knew what would happen next. As news of the walkout spread in local prep distance-running circles, Borja considered taking the story to the media. "I advised him to put it out there," Lajvardi says. "The more publicity, the better. Once you gain notoriety, you are no longer powerless."

Cruickshank, whom Borja also consulted, advised against going to the press. "I thought that the situation was already too overheated," he says. "Both sides needed a chance to cool off and work out an agreement away from the glare of publicity."

Borja then took the question to the boys' parents, who voted unanimously to make the story public. He contacted a reporter from the Arizona Republic, and a few days later an article appeared in the state's largest newspaper. An accompanying photo showed Borja standing in front of the team in his scowling, confrontational mode. Soon, the story was picked up by other papers and on the Internet.

The publicity further antagonized school officials. "The media made this into an immigration issue, and it had nothing to do with immigration," says Craig Pletenik, spokesman for the school district. "Alhambra students are 78 percent Hispanic, and a high percentage are undocumented. District-wide, we take every child who comes to us, and we do our best to serve them. In this case we were unfairly portrayed as piling on a poor illegal immigrant. The district didn't need or deserve that kind of attention."

And yet the attention seemed to produce the results that Lajvardi had predicted. District officials met with the AD, team members, and parents. The officials determined that Aparicio didn't meet the requirements as a volunteer, but that Borja would be able to continue as coach.

The boys returned to training with a vengeance that was only tempered because Aparicio was no longer a daily presence in their lives. While their workouts were largely unchanged, their minds were in the wind. Jorge knew that Coach Carlos and the other boys would be looking to him for leadership, and he relished the challenge. He threw himself into the final weeks of training. He had other role models beside his coaches—he had his idol, Prefontaine, who always ran from the front, risking everything each time he stepped to the line. Jorge competed with the same fiery, imperious style. He would risk everything for his teammates and coaches—for his family. Jorge always ran from the front. If he died, he would die with pride.

Borja recognized that it wouldn't be a problem to summon emotion for the upcoming meets—emotion, in fact, might be the problem. He tried to keep the boys on an even keel, to shield them from the tension and controversy. The uproar would unsettle any kid, but for the Alhambra runners it could be debilitating. They lived in an insular community that spoke mostly Spanish. As illegals, they'd spent their whole lives avoiding the spotlight. Now they were flooded with it, and Borja worried that the pressure might be too much. It might have been different if Aparicio were around, clowning and laughing, but now he was gone. "I finally saw that it was pointless to try to repress the boys' feelings," Borja says. "They would either ride the emotional tide or sink under it."

Jorge won the regional final, decisively beating his big rival, Jeffrey Segovia of Trevor G. Browne High School. Now there was only one more race to run, but most observers gave Alhambra little chance of winning the state meet. "Given all their distractions and disruptions," Cruickshank says, "we didn't expect them to be in top form that day."

In the moments before the gun, the boys and Borja gathered for a final huddle. So much had happened to tear the team apart, and yet they remained one. Aparicio was not permitted to join them, but no law could prevent him from attending the meet as a spectator. The boys saw him standing at a short distance. In their hearts and minds he remained Coach Miguel.

As the race unfolded, the conventional wisdom appeared to hold; it didn't seem to be Alhambra's day. Segovia, whom Jorge had beaten the week before, was running much stronger today. Jorge had chosen a tree to mark the point where he'd launch his final surge. He thought that Jeffrey would be gone by then, but he was still next to him. A wave of nausea rose and subsided, followed by a cold surge of doubt. I might not win this year, Jorge thought. Without his first-place points, his team might also fall short. Looking up, he saw Borja standing on a hill near the finish, roaring at him to bear down. Jorge had spent five years with Borja. Under his influence, Jorge had grown from a boy into a man. From Borja he had learned that a man never let down the people who depended on him.

Jorge glanced over at his opponent. "Let's go, Jeffrey!" he shouted in challenge. And then he floored it. He gained a step on his rival. Jorge powered down the stretch to win the 5-K contest in a time of 15:43.6, four seconds ahead of Segovia. But his race still wasn't over. He turned to watch his teammates come across the line. In the jumble and tumult, with so many runners lunging and gasping, it was hard to know what was happening. Then he looked up and saw Coach Carlos pumping his fist. Four other boys had finished in the top 26, and within 18 seconds of each other—enough to return the state team title to Alhambra High School.

What happened next could not be stopped by any school board or state law. The boys of Alhambra mashed together in a joyous finish- line pileup. Carlos Borja jumped on the pile. Miguel Aparicio jumped on the pile. Then the whole squad, flanked by Coach Carlos and Coach Miguel, lifted the championship trophy into the air. They had stuck together, and they had won together.


On a cloudless Saturday morning in April, almost a year after his arrest following a traffic stop in Casa Grande, Miguel Aparicio takes a visitor on a tour of his incarceration. If time allows, they'll go down to the border, to see where he first crossed into America.

Waiting outside his condo in Scottsdale, Aparicio looks weary and middle-aged. The strain and uncertainty of the last 12 months are beginning to show. Westover has recently told him that his final court hearing will likely be late this year, at which point, in his own best interest, he should sign a voluntary departure order—if one is granted—the same step he could have taken the day after his arrest. Within 120 days of that agreement, Aparicio would need to pay his own way back to the Mexican village that he last lived in 20 years ago, which the U.S. government has determined as his rightful home.

"I will not stay there," he says. "My life is here now. I will come back to the United States any way that I can." If and when Aparicio returns, however, his days as a certified high-school running coach will be over. Keeping to the undocumented shadows, he will have to find something else to live for. In that vein, Aparicio's contributions to Alhambra's 2009 state champion team have been officially expunged. In the team picture taken just after the race, Aparicio stood beside the jubilant boys. But in the photo that hangs on the wall of the high school gym, the public record of their accomplishment, his image had been cropped out of it. It's as if someone is trying to erase part of his life.

Despite all this, Aparicio brightens when he sees his visitor's car. He climbs into the passenger seat and guides the way down I-10 to Casa Grande. He shows his visitor the Circle K where he stopped for coffee and the corner where the deputy pulled him over. For a moment Aparicio sits on the retaining wall where he waited while the deputy called ICE.

Then he leads the way out of Casa Grande to the town of Florence, where after a few wrong turns, Aparicio finds the Pinal County Adult Detention Center. He points out the McDonald's at the entrance to the prison, glinting in the desert sun.

"I only saw it that one time in the middle of the night," Aparicio recalls. "But inside I thought about it a lot. I was hungry the whole time I was in jail. I thought about how good two Big Macs would taste."

Now it's lunchtime, and Aparicio enters the restaurant and orders the meal he dreamed about. With lunch completed, the tour continues. On the way out of Florence, they pass the entrance to Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. His visitor suggests that they take a quick look, and Aparicio agrees. "I've always been curious about this place," he says.

The monument consists of ruins left by an Indian civilization that thrived in the desert more than a thousand years ago. The civilization was highly advanced, with a sophisticated irrigation system and a religion based on the sun and stars, and a ball game resembling the modern sport of basketball. But then, at the height of its power, the civilization vanished. Within a few years, the people abandoned this compound, for reasons as confounding as our current need to exile women and men such as Miguel Aparicio.

Watching Aparicio examine the ruins, taking particular interest in the adobe architecture due to his background in the building trades, it's tempting to speculate what tourists traveling this country a thousand years from now will think about the ruins they encounter. What will they make of the mammoth structures standing by themselves in the desert badlands, with their bars and cells and windowless walls? What manner of civilization would build such frightful and puzzling wonders?

After looking around 15 minutes, Aparicio walks purposefully back to the parking lot. The day is growing short, and it's still a long way to the border.

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7 ... 14,00.html

Holy cow! I’ve read life biographies shorter than this SOB story! Anyway, it’s satisfying to know this invader has been deported! No doubt he’ll be back in defiance of our immigration laws once more. Of course we’ll be subjected to the endless SOB stories then as well, in order to drum up public sympathy to keep the invader around.

At least today we can celebrate one small victory for America!

Phoenix cross-country coach deported

Posted: 5:44 PM
Last Updated: 2 hours and 8 minutes ago

By: Mike Pelton



PHOENIX - A Valley high school track coach was deported Tuesday after officials said he was living in the country illegally for more than two decades.

Officials said Miguel Aparicio came to the United States illegally with his grandmother more than 20 years ago, when Miguel was just 15. Since then, he has worked as an electrician and was also a volunteer cross-country coach at Alhambra High School, where he helped lead the team to several state titles.

“I don’t know if I’d be in college right now if it wasn’t for him,â€

Holy cow! I’ve read life biographies shorter than this SOB story! Anyway

I know!! I thought I was reading a Charles Dickens novel for a while. I was waiting for one of them to complain that he didn't get enough porridge in his bowl, for Gods sake.

- A Valley high school track coach was deported Tuesday after officials said he was living in the country illegally for more than two decades.

I love a story with a happy ending!!!!

I read quite a bit of this story, but it kept coming back to the fact he's been here 20 YEARSand never bothered to make it legal! Granny, who brought him across did it, why couldn't this man be bothered? I have to assume he didn't out of that famous sense of entitlement! He had the American dream, so what more could he want? He had a job, a home and he got fame too. That all fed his ego and that "they won't dare to touch me" attitude. WRONG! You got what you deserve, idiot!

And that cavalier attitude that we can't keep him out:

"I will not stay there," he says. "My life is here now. I will come back to the United States any way that I can."

will be his downfall, I hope! Someone will spot him, recognize him and turn his butt in! He's been officially deported, if he comes back he faces jail. And he deserves no better!

Originally Posted by pattyk

Holy cow! I’ve read life biographies shorter than this SOB story! Anyway

I know!! I thought I was reading a Charles Dickens novel for a while. I was waiting for one of them to complain that he didn't get enough porridge in his bowl, for Gods sake.