July 04, 2009 11:50 am
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TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — He was born on the Fourth of July, an irony he would learn to appreciate later, during the dark period of his life, when liberty and freedom came to mean something far more real than words in his high school history book.
Daniel Guadron has been fighting the odds all his young life, mostly as a happy warrior, winning admirers and supporters at every turn.
It’s not just that he excelled in school: The straight-A student mastered English within months of emigrating from Guatemala at 13, then mastered French. He’s aced every math test he has ever taken.
Or that he is blessed with a sunny nature, sparkling mind and ever-flashing smile.
Or that he shines on the soccer field and on the wrestling mat.
The handsome, crewcut young man has always possessed something more, a wisdom that radiates from his deep brown eyes, a thirst for knowledge and for self-improvement, a clarity of vision about the nature of the world, good and bad, and what he can achieve in it.
Everyone could see it — his teachers at Trenton Central High, his coaches, the running buddies who trained with him for his first 10K race, co-workers in the restaurant where he works at weekends, even a lawyer he befriended in the corporate building he cleans at nights. “Mr. Professor,” the lawyer dubbed the cheerful teen who swept floors even as he dreamed of becoming an engineer.
Daniel’s guidance counselor called him “everyone’s shining star.”
And then, one chilly day in April 2008, the 18-year-old star disappeared.
———
They thundered into the inner-city row house at dawn, seven armed men shouting and banging doors, their guns as prominent as the letters emblazoned on their windbreakers: ICE.
Daniel was in bed, but he knew who the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had come for — his mother, Luisa, who had left for work a short time earlier. If you don’t tell us where she is, he recalls them saying, we will take you.
Daniel dressed silently. He was glad she wasn’t there, his sweet, humble mother, who could barely speak English, who worked so hard cleaning buildings, who cooked the best rice dishes in the world. She had raised her children alone, showering them with love though they lived in a run-down section of Trenton and had no money for luxuries other kids take for granted — cell phones, computers, cars. She had sacrificed so much since emigrating from Guatemala in 2003.
Daniel would do anything for her.
And so, as neighbors peered fearfully from windows, agents handcuffed and shackled him and put him in a van with a family from Costa Rica who had also been dragged from their beds. They drove 52 miles to Elizabeth, to a windowless warehouse on a bleak industrial strip near Newark International Airport. There, Daniel was handed a drab blue prison uniform and locked up with 300 other immigrants.
“Why am I being treated like a criminal,” he thought, “when I have done nothing wrong?”
It didn’t take long for him to learn about the otherworldly universe of U.S. detention centers, where every year about 350,000 asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are held indefinitely while the government decides their fate.
Daniel knew that immigrants can be deported if they don’t have proper papers. Plenty of illegals live in Trenton, and he had heard horror stories about families swept up in ICE raids.
He was aware that his parents, who had separated years earlier, had been working with a lawyer to sort out the family’s legal status.
Still, he couldn’t understand why he was being punished for their mistakes. After all, he had a Social Security number and legal permission to study and work while the family’s case was pending.
His mother sobbed over the phone, promising the lawyer would do everything to free him. A cousin assured him that he would get out in a few days.
But as the days passed into weeks, Daniel began to despair. He ached for his soccer buddies, his books, his mom. The rules said he couldn’t have his text books because they were hardbacks.
His family couldn’t visit because they feared being locked up, too.
Everything about the prison-like setting seemed so dehumanizing, so surreal — from the thin, wooden board that served as his bed, to the fact that guards called him by his bunk number, H-38, not his name.
But what horrified Daniel most was the hopelessness he saw all around — the haunted, crushed looks of people with nothing to do except fear the future and wonder if they would ever be free. Thank God, he thought, they took me and not my mother.
He stumbled through the first week in shock, playing cards and dominos with the family from Costa Rica. But they were deported after 10 days. Others disappeared regularly. In time, Daniel began to fear the unimaginable: Could he be deported, too?
He yearned for fresh air: The “outdoor recreation” area was nothing more that a large room with a skylight where detainees could exercise for one hour a day. He desperately missed school, especially math. He had been so proud of scoring 96 in honors trigonometry, it made him miserable to think of falling behind.
In H dorm Malcolm Ikolo could see his young bunkmate deteriorating, losing weight, turning pale, his eyes growing sad and dull. Ikolo, a 37-year-old marketing consultant married to an American, had been in detention for two months, fighting deportation to the Congo. He had worked hard to find ways to stay mentally strong.
“Work,” he urged Daniel. “Read, exercise, pray. Keep as busy as you can. You are young and you are smart. You will survive if you keep your mind busy and your body strong.”
And so Daniel resolved to fill every second of every day, to wear himself out physically and mentally so that when night came he would be rewarded with the sweet escape of sleep.
He began working out with Ikolo, sometimes doing push-ups and calisthenics for hours. He practiced his French — a language he loved — becoming a favorite of other detainees for his willingness to translate documents and letters for them. He practiced yoga. He learned to breakdance, delighting dormmates with his efforts to spin and drop and slide.
Even the staff were drawn to their youngest detainee, who won coveted jobs in the kitchen and the warehouse. And, in a place jaded by indifference and despair, he won something more rare — kindness and respect.
Everyone knew it was wrong — the student missing school, the son paying the price for his parents.
In the evenings Daniel would join the “storytime” sessions in the dorm, when men from Africa and India and China would sit on bunks and sip tea and share tales of their countries and their families and their dreams.
My dream is to go to college, he told them. I want to become an engineer — a great engineer. I want to design bridges so exotic that people will look at them and say, ah, that’s a Guadron bridge.
Daniel told them of growing up in his grandparents’ house in the country with vegetables and chickens and flowers and of how he hoped one day to have a house and family of his own.
He described his initial excitement at landing in America, how shocked he had been by the run-down streets of Trenton, how overjoyed by the blessing of school.
“I look strong here,” he was fond of saying, flexing his biceps. Then he would tap his forehead. “But up here is where I am really strong.”
But it wasn’t just friendships or determination or even prayer that buoyed Daniel, though every night he clasped his rosary beads and asked God for the courage to get through another day.
What inspired his deepest strength was a book, a slim, earmarked volume he plucked from the ragged selection of paperbacks donated to detainees. In the pages of “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Daniel found reason to believe. The indignities and injustice he was suffering paled in comparison to the evil that Wiesel had witnessed and endured.
Reading “Night,” Daniel knew he would survive Elizabeth, that it wouldn’t even be that hard, that he would emerge stronger and bolder, maybe even a better person. And that one day he would tell the world.
———
Back in Trenton, word spread quickly. It echoed through the corridors and classrooms of Trenton Central High: “They’ve taken Daniel.”
In her second-floor classroom, English as a Second Language teacher Iseult Leger choked back tears thinking of the teenager who had captivated her from the moment he arrived. “It was heartbreaking to think of him wasting his mind in that place. Daniel, of all students.”
In her chaotic office, bursting with students and files and snacks, the normally ebullient guidance counselor Miriam Mendez felt suddenly helpless and lost. In 23 years of teaching and counseling, Mendez had rarely met anyone as deserving of a great education and a happy life. Now what would become her star, the one destined to graduate among the best in his class?
In the office building Daniel cleaned, lawyer Robert Lytle’s heart sank when he thought of his “Mr. Professor” behind bars. The 45-year-old former prosecutor knows prisons, knows how incarceration can erode a person’s soul. How could this happen, he thought, to a kid bursting with such personality and promise?
In fact, immigration lawyers say it happens all the time, young people swept up in raids and locked up because their parents brought them into the country illegally. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, teenagers are routinely deported back to countries and cultures they barely know, places where they last lived as infants.
ICE defends the practice, blaming the parents for poor choices.
“These are particularly compelling cases,” spokeswoman Pat Reilly said. “But the parents made a decision when he was a child. The Department of Homeland Security did not make that decision.”
But even Keith Sklar, the lawyer representing the Guadron family, was stunned when Daniel’s sister, Sara, called him with the news: “They came and took my brother.”
In more than a decade of practice, Sklar, who runs a small immigration law office with his wife, had never had a client picked up in a raid. His first response was outrage. What on earth was the government thinking, warehousing a high school senior, and a brilliant one at that?
His second was to file an appeal for parole, and to go to authorities at the Elizabeth detention center, which is run by a private prison company called Corrections Corporation of America. There, he learned that Daniel’s arrest was apparently the result of some paperwork confusion; ICE said the family had missed a scheduled court appearance and were therefore considered deportable and a flight risk.
As familiar as he is with the inconsistencies and seeming absurdities of ICE bureaucracy, Sklar was incredulous. “Clearly Daniel Guadron is not a flight risk,” he recalls telling officials angrily. “All he want’s to do is go back to school and graduate with his class.”
But they refused to release Daniel.
In her tiny apartment on Hamilton Avenue, Daniel’s mother sobbed uncontrollably as Sara pleaded with her to be strong. “Mama, we have a lawyer. We are doing everything. We will get Daniel free.”
But privately Sara, who was juggling jobs in a legal office and cleaning buildings while putting herself through college, was terrified ICE would come for her, too.
Sklar had started working with the family two years earlier, trying to win legal status under NACARA, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. The act provides relief for families from certain Central American countries, including Guatemala, if a family member had been living here for years. Because Daniel’s father had emigrated years earlier, Sklar believed he could win legal status for the entire family. The Guadrons had already attended several court hearings (a final decision in the case is scheduled for October 2009).
On visits with Daniel, Sklar tried to reassure him. “Be patient. There is a good chance we are going to win.”
But, as months passed, Daniel was finding it harder and harder to be patient.
His letters to Sara all said the same thing: “Please get me out of this terrible place.”
For all his efforts to be positive, there were days so dark Daniel broke down and cried.
There was July 4, his 19th birthday, when Ikolo donated his dessert — a muffin — as a birthday cake and bunkmates sang “Happy Birthday.” And the day his grandmother came to see him, the only family member who dared because she was legally visiting from Guatemala. Seeing her Daniel behind a dirty glass partition in the visitor’s room, unable to hug him, permitted only to talk by phone, she wept.
He looks so pale, she told Sara. That place is killing my beautiful grandson.
But the blackest day was Sept. 7, the first day of school. Daniel couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t even bring himself to work out. He lay on his bunk tormented by images of his classmates filing into classrooms with their backpacks full of books. How would he ever catch up? Would he even graduate?
“I feel like this place is crushing me, that all my life and dreams are just being squeezed out of me,” he told Ikolo. “I feel so ... small.”
Even Ikolo could find no words of consolation for his young friend.
———
“Pack your things,” the guard said. “You are getting out.”
Daniel’s heart raced. Was he being deported or was he being freed?
In an office he signed a slew of release forms. As other detainees realized what was happening — that Daniel was being paroled — the dorms erupted in cheers. They banged on tables and chanted his name.
“Good luck, Daniel!” they shouted. “Remember us, Daniel!”
At 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30, 2008, after nearly seven months in detention, Daniel stepped into the parking lot, inhaling the cold, fresh air as if it was a drug. Sara was waiting. She had spent the day signing paperwork and collecting donations from relatives to pay for her brother’s $3,000 bail. Sklar had managed to reopen the family’s case and secure Daniel’s release.
Tears streamed down both their faces as they drove away.
The Guadron family held a feast that night, shrimp and steak and rice, all his favorites. But Daniel couldn’t taste the food, couldn’t sleep. He just wanted to get back to school.
When he strode into his school the next morning it seemed like the corridors were ringing with his name. Classmates shrieked and clapped, teachers wrapped him in hugs, his counselor wept. “It was like I was a rock star,” he says, laughing at the memory.
But his joy was quickly tempered by a grim reality: Because Daniel had missed nearly two quarters, his usual straight-A’s had been replaced by zeros. His place in graduation would be affected, along with his prospects for college.
Worse, the one college he had set his heart on — the New Jersey Institute of Technology — said it couldn’t even process his financial aid application because he was not a permanent resident. At Mercer County Community College he was told that he would have to pay full tuition, $3,824 a semester, unless he had a green card.
Daniel’s heart sank. His pay in the restaurant and at the cleaning job went toward his mother’s rent and living expenses. How could he possibly raise nearly $4,000?
What about my dreams of becoming an engineer, he asked Sara, despondently.
His sister stared at him in disbelief. “Daniel,” she said, “you made it through detention. You can make it through anything. People find ways to pay for their dreams.”
———
Detention changed Daniel; everyone could see it. Sara jokes that it made him “nicer”; she laughs at how considerate her brother has become, more willing to pitch in. His mother sensed a newfound wisdom, a protectiveness and maturity that saddened her because she knew it came from suffering. And yet she marveled, along with friends and teachers, at how his spirit had not been extinguished and how his determination was as strong as ever.
At school Daniel quickly caught up, earning A’s in every subject. He began running again, training for his first marathon. He started a breakdancing group with friends. With the help of Mendez, he secured three small scholarships, covering about half his tuition costs for Mercer. He hopes that by next year he will have a green card and can transfer to NJIT.
But he would worry about that later. First, he celebrated.
On June 24, Daniel Humbarto Guadron donned a black cap and gown and processed with his classmates to the podium inside the cavernous Sovereign Bank Arena in downtown Trenton. There, to the thundering applause of several thousand onlookers, he was awarded his high school diploma. He had graduated 63rd in a class of 456. It was the happiest moment of his life.
Outside the arena, Daniel’s mother and grandmother and sister engulfed him in hugs. His 4-year-old cousin leapt into his arms. Teachers congratulated him. Cameras clicked. Daniel beamed, thanking everyone, telling them how grateful he was, promising to do great things with his life. “You will see!” he cried. “The world is going to know the name Daniel Guadron.”
Sara rolled her eyes. “You would think he had won the lottery,” she said, laughing as her brother did a silly little tap dance in front of her.
“It’s better than winning the lottery,” Daniel retorted. “Today is the start of all my dreams coming true.”
With that, this irrepressible young man — locked up for seven months by the U.S. government and stronger in spite of it — scooped up his cousin and went skipping and smiling down the road.
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