The next day - unless something dramatic and unexpected happens -19-year old Marie Gonzales and her parents will be deported from the U.S.
Marie is an honor student, a track star and a spokesperson for a national campaign to help immigrant students. She is known in her community as "brilliant," "a superstar," "magical."
Marie came to the U.S. with her parents, Marvin and Marina, when she was five. Her native Costa Rica is all but unknown to her.
The Gonzales family came to America on visitor's visas. According to Tolerance.org, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group, "a lawyer told them that as long as they played by the rules, they could apply for permanent resident status after seven years."
But changes in immigration laws - and attitudes toward immigrants - turned their lives upside down. The law that would have allowed them to become permanent residents was repealed in 1997. In November 2001, a second lawyer advised the family to wait until the anti-immigrant furor caused by the September 11th terrorist attacks had subsided.
It didn't and, in 2002, someone contacted Marvin's employer, former Missouri Gov. Bob Holden -- for whom he worked as a mail courier during the anthrax scare -- and suggested they investigate the family's immigration status.
"When they looked, they saw that our visas expired in 2001," Marie said. Because they had valid Social Security numbers, Marie says it was the first time her family realized they were undocumented. The deportation notice arrived in the mail soon after.
Last May, Marie graduated from Helias High School, with honors and with dreams of going to law school. But as an undocumented student, she wasn't eligible for in-state tuition or financial aid.
Marie and her parents are among the almost 10 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. A steady drumbeat of anti-immigrant sentiment -- from the Minuteman Project to the elected officials who want to close U.S. borders -- has created a backlash against people like the Gonzalez family.
But in Jefferson City, residents are bucking the trend.
"They have become vital members of our community," said local business owner Ed Stroesser. "They give more to the community than most folks in this town."
Stroesser belongs to the Gonzalez Group, nurses, teachers, homemakers, businesspeople, state employees and a priest -- about 40 members strong -- who are fighting to stop the family's deportation.
Since forming in January, they have researched and rallied themselves into a grassroots machine, pumping out petitions, phone calls and faxes, talking with any reporter who will listen, organizing marches to the state capitol.
Marie has spoken at rallies, testified before the Missouri legislature and become a spokesperson for the DREAM Act, federal legislation that would help some undocumented students attend college and gain legal status.
"Hopefully I've changed a few people's minds," she says, "so they can see that immigrants can be great people."
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