Case by case, activists fight deportations
"A few months ago, Herta Llusho was just another college student. Then the government ordered her deported, and Llusho became an Internet celebrity almost overnight.
An army of supporters - including more than 2,800 Facebook fans, and counting - quickly launched a campaign on her behalf, and the 20-year-old immigrant from Albania recently won a three-month reprieve to remain in the United States. Now, she has become so popular that a stranger in Michigan recently spotted her in a restaurant and said, “Hey, you’re the girl that they’ve been talking about.’’
The bespectacled honor student is the third young person in the past few weeks to successfully delay deportation amid extraordinary public campaigns that combined grass-roots organizing with online social networking. Frustrated by the failure to pass federal legislation called the Dream Act that would allow illegal immigrants brought here before they were 15 to apply for legal residency, advocates are pushing to halt their deportations, one by one."
MARIA SACCHETTI in the Boston Globe.