"i'm from a small town of 600 people in Oaxaca, Mexico," Saavedra tells me. "My mom was the oldest of twelve and my dad was the youngest of five, so they grew up in pretty impoverished circumstances. They got married young and decided to relocate to the States when I was three."

The year was 1992 and Mexico's pre-NAFTA economy was in shambles. The border back then was not the militarized zone it has become in the years since 9/11, but crossing it, especially with two small children (Saavedra's sister was four), was still dangerous. The family hired a guide, or "coyote," and crossed at night near Nogales, Arizona. After regrouping in Phoenix, the Saavedras made their way to New York City.

They settled in Washington Heights, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood in northern Manhattan. "We were surrounded by immigrants," Saavedra says, "but most had already lived there for one or two generations, so we were still outcasts." The family lived quietly and tried to stay out of trouble. Saavedra's mother found work at a garment factory near the Port Authority, and then as a high school janitor. His father took two buses to a job pumping gas in New Jersey, until he was found out and fired for not having papers. Eventually, the senior Saavedra caught on as a food deliveryman and, in what spare time he had, began learning the tricks of the restaurant trade.

His son, meanwhile, had started attracting a different kind of attention. After excelling in middle school, Marco was recommended for Prep for Prep, a nonprofit that aids in the education and school placement of promising minority students. He continued to stand out, and in eighth grade was accepted to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

"It was a shock," he says. "I had never lived away from home. I was on an equal footing academically, but I was clueless about everything else-like the wardrobe. They tell you coat and tie, so I showed up at my first dinner wearing a full suit and dress shoes. I didn't know you could wear khakis and flip-flops!"

But Saavedra was recognizing his otherness in more important ways as well. "Have you ever read Their Eyes Were Watching God?" he asks, motioning toward the bookshelf behind him. "There's that scene near the beginning when the main character sees herself in a photograph and realizes for the first time that she's colored. Deerfield is when I realized I was very much in the minority in terms of where I came from, what I looked like, and, of course, my legal status."

Saavedra remembers sitting in the student lounge of his dorm, watching immigration marches on TV for the first time. What a revelation! That a movement existed out there, activists fighting for people like him. He was by now quite familiar with the realities of being undocumented-the truths he couldn't share, the places he couldn't go-so it was hardly a shock when, during his junior year, Deerfield's college guidance counselor told Saavedra some schools might be less amenable than others to his "situation." Dartmouth was struck from the list, and Cornell. But Saavedra already had his eyes on Kenyon. There was something open and accepting about the place. And Kenyon wanted him as well.

"We were aware of his status," says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions and financial aid. "He applied early, was qualified for Kenyon work, and could write his socks off. It wasn't a hard decision, though I do remember we had to think about what it would mean to enroll a student who was 'out of status.'"

While no law explicitly prohibits colleges and universities from admitting undocumented students, the practice is controversial (in theory, the coveted spot could otherwise go to a legal citizen), and, with financial aid almost always involved, sometimes cost-prohibitive. But Kenyon is hardly alone in its openness. According to a 2011 study, 57 percent of private colleges and 29 percent of public colleges provide aid to undocumented students, although of the 2,650 institutions surveyed, only 447 responded.

"It does feel a little risky to be public on the fact that we enroll and fund undocumented students," Delahunty says. "But imagine if we hadn't enrolled Marco?"

For two years Saavedra kept his illegal status a secret from both friends and faculty. He found solace in Kenyon's religious community, becoming a peer minister, and developed serious interests in painting, poetry, and multicultural literature. But try as he might, the issue of who he was-and wasn't-consumed him, as did his sense of social justice, his need to get involved, to do something.

Unable to spend a semester abroad his junior year, he enrolled at Georgetown, where he fell in with a group of immigration activists known as "Dreamers." They took their name from the DREAM Act, an as-yet-unpassed measure that would grant conditional permanent residency to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors, have stayed for at least five years, graduated from high school, and have no criminal record. Like Saavedra, most of the Georgetown activists were young and undocumented; unlike him, most had also gone public with their status. It was more than a matter of pride; his new friends believed "being out" humanized their cause. Proclaiming their illegality was a great risk-deportations had reached record levels during President Obama's first term-but the torment of staying silent cut
far deeper.

Back at Kenyon for his senior year, Saavedra spoke freely about his undocumented status for the first time. It made him feel emboldened, like he finally belonged, and he began devoting much of his time to immigration issues. The DREAM Act had recently been voted down for the third time since 2001, but another presidential election was coming up and, with a growing Hispanic population changing electoral dynamics, immigration reform loomed large.

Saavedra organized workshops and invited speakers to campus in an effort to raise awareness of the issue. At Honors Day, his dedication was rewarded when he won Kenyon's Humanitarian Award and Martin Luther King Jr. Award, the latter presented to the student who has "best promoted social justice through service activities and programs as exemplified by the life and work of Dr. King."

"When he got [the two awards] the entire audience rose spontaneously to its feet," Delahunty says. "Faculty, students, administration. Everyone on campus knew Marco."

Perhaps no one has influenced the course of Saavedra's life more than Aileen Hefferren, the chief executive of Prep for Prep and a Kenyon trustee. Hefferren '88 H'12 first met Saavedra when he was at Deerfield, and the two became close during his time in Gambier. (Prep for Prep has had a decades-long relationship with Kenyon, and it was a Prep counselor who first suggested the College to Saavedra.) "I was always struck by Marco's soft-spoken intelligence and his very deep sense of justice and compassion for others," Hefferren says. "I respect that he acts on [these traits] even when it means putting himself at risk. I might prefer to protect him, but real leaders sometimes take real risks."

Indeed, Saavedra's work as an activist was only beginning. After graduation, he started organizing almost full time for the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), a grassroots group of mostly undocumented students who believed civil disobedience to be more effective than legislative lobbying when it came to raising awareness of their plight. Saavedra took a lead role in NIYA's actions, and in the late summer of 2011 he was arrested while protesting in Charlotte, North Carolina. He spent three nights in jail, but emerged resolute and undeterred (the charges were eventually dropped).

He and his fellow activists continued their campaign in cities across the country throughout the winter and spring of 2012. Polls showed Hispanic voters favoring Democrats by large margins, but many Dreamers attributed those numbers to Republican anti-immigration sentiment rather than anything the Obama administration had accomplished. While the president had offered tepid support for the DREAM Act, he was also responsible for tightened border security and record-breaking numbers of deportations (396,000 in 2011, according to the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Then in June, just as Saavedra was preparing to "occupy" an Obama campaign office in Cincinnati, the president announced a "reprieve" program for certain undocumented immigrants. "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" offered two-year deferrals, along with work permits, for people who met the requirements laid out in the DREAM Act. What it did not promise-and what the DREAM Act did-was a concrete road to citizenship. Saavedra carried on with his sit-in, which by then was making headlines.

"'Deferred Action' was a compromise," Saavedra explains. "We got it because President Obama needed to win an election. Also, Senator Marco Rubio had introduced his own version of the DREAM Act, and that was troublesome for the Democrats."

Buoyed by the media's coverage of their actions, the NIYA organizers now focused their energies on halting non-criminal deportations. They set their sights on the detention centers where immigrants were being held. One of the largest and most notorious was in Broward County, Florida.