An Up-the-Hill Battle

"That was strange to me because in my country it is very different," said Adriana Pelaez, 31, who also came from Mexico. "Talking face to face with congresistas in Mexico, they are not very nice. Here they are more polite."

Pelaez's husband made the journey north seven years ago, entering illegally. The couple was separated for five years. She visited him on a tourist visa. She could not bear to leave him again, so she overstayed her visa. She has a master's degree in communications, but she works as a waitress in Baltimore because she can't get a Social Security card.

Another thing about lobbying in Mexico, said Pelaez: You can't do it. You must cut through such red tape that you never get to see anyone. Not only that, her impression is that Mexican legislators can't do much about the laws anyway. What counts is how much money you have.

She believes money does not hold sway in the United States, and the government of the people is just that.

Imagine.

"That's why I like the United States," Pelaez said. "And I like the system."

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The group of a dozen from Baltimore that included Villalva and Peleaz breakfasted on spicy tamales and a hot drink of atole (water, chocolate, cinnamon and wheat flour) before piling into a van and heading to the Hill.

They were organized by CASA of Maryland, the immigrant rights advocacy group, which also scrambled a second team out of Silver Spring. In most offices the teams were allowed to meet only with staffs -- welcome to the reality of nonprofit lobbying, amigos! -- but in a few cases they got face time with members of Congress.

During the van ride down I-95, CASA organizer Elizabeth Alex passed out sheets on good lobbying behavior, in English and Spanish:

"Don't fight with your Congress member or his staff."

"Answer courteously the questions and the worries."

Wouldn't it have been better for the grass-roots immigrant lobbyists to be registered voters, a force politicians understand?

That's usually the rule, Alex says, but not necessarily on this day. The point was to put a human face on the consequences of legislative action. Some of the "paths to citizenship" for illegal immigrants that the Senate is debating would treat people differently depending on how many years they have been in the country. This could break up families, says Alex.

Besides, she adds, the citizens-in-training might be their own best advocates.

"They went through so much to get here, and so much to stay, because they are people who believe in the American dream, believe in the American system, and they want to participate," Alex says.

In the lobbying sessions, Ruppersberger and most of the Congress members and staffs firmly embraced strong border security, then groped for ways to define the middle ground of allowing many illegal immigrants to become citizens without granting "amnesty." The Baltimore group focused on House members; anything worked out in the Senate will go to conference with the House -- as the pre-citizens could tell you.

"I think it went good," said Aldo Figueroa, 28, a realtor in Baltimore who overstayed a tourist visa from Peru more than six years ago, but has since married an American and obtained legal status. He's about to apply for citizenship.

At first Figueroa was intimidated at the prospect of meeting lawmakers, he said, but "once I'm sitting there in front of a congressman . . . I feel I'm one-on-one with another human being."

German Cruz, a day laborer who made it from Honduras via the Mexican border near San Diego two years ago, said he used to lobby local Honduran officials about public services, but now he is in the big leagues, a letter-writer to American legislators. He strode with a confident swagger through the Rayburn office building in a paint-spattered camouflage vest, under the noses of House members who voted last December to label people like him felons fit for deportation.

He even joined the group lobbying a staffer for Rep. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat running for the Senate, who also voted for that tough bill. Cruz, 52, said afterward he was not cowed. "He who owes nothing fears nothing," he said.

Villalva, of Dundalk, who ended the day she went to Washington by attending a late-afternoon rally on the Mall, said she wasn't nervous either about telling the truth to members of the government whose law she broke 18 years ago. She joined this nascent movement sweeping the country somewhat timidly several weeks ago, coming to the capital for her first big rally. She feared immigration authorities might round up everyone.

This time she came to lobby.

"Today, no, I don't care if they throw me out," she said. "I need to come and talk. It is the truth."