In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system,non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor,judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush'sorder calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.

You think it's impossible to be a passive fighter? Well, sometimes fighting just means existing. Existing, not going away, and quietly biding your time.

If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility. Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he's never counted.

Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.

I asked a man who took a death boat to Europe across the treachelous waters of the Mediterranean from Libya"Why are you taking this death boat". "I am already dead." He said. This is my coffin. If I succeed to get to the other side, I get a new life. If I fail, I loose nothing. I remain what I am now: Dead.