UNO grad’s aim to soar as U.S. pilot dashed by immigration status, despite Rep. Bacon’s intervention

OMAHA — Ever since she can remember, Mariana Juarez wanted to fly.

A commercial pilot’s license seemed a distant dream, though, when family hardships in her home in Guerrero, Mexico, drove her out of school at age 14.

Two years later, she and her mom fled to the United States without authorization. They were allowed to stay while the federal government weighed their cases. But shortly afterward, Juarez said, depression gripped her mom and she returned to Mexico, leaving her daughter with relatives in Omaha.

With the help of a cousin, Juarez enrolled in high school, won a full-ride private scholarship and this year graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with honors and an aviation degree. Along the way she worked full time, obtained a private pilot’s license and, at age 24, was in the process of achieving certification as a commercial pilot.

But her plan has been thwarted by immigration legal problems. When she was a teen, unbeknownst to her until later, an immigration judge had ordered her removed from the country.

Despite the weight of a well-known legal team — and intervention from a Republican congressman — Homeland Security officials have declined to reverse course and allow her to stay legally.

Juarez plans a September return to the homeland she hasn’t seen in eight years. She chose to buy a one-way ticket out rather than risk detention amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push, which he argues protects U.S. jobs, public resources and public safety.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska’s Omaha-heavy 2nd District said he met Juarez and went to the top seeking a different outcome, twice speaking to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. He said he was told — most recently this past week — there’d be no exception.

“It’s an unchristian policy we’re seeing here,” Bacon said in an interview with the Examiner. “I get it, we wanted to secure the borders. I think we’ve done that. We don’t want dangerous people here, I get it. But what’s going on here is a terrible overreach, a terrible injustice.”

Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general wrapping up his fifth term, said he’s armed with examples of other constituents, and is calling on Republican colleagues to support immigration reform that “makes sense.”

Teen steered her own path in foreign land

Juarez launched her U.S. education in 2018, in the halls of the largest high school in Nebraska’s most populated city.

By the time she enrolled in Martha Omar’s senior English class at Omaha Central High, the teen had learned a second language and had become a “bridge” helping other immigrant students adjust.

“She was a student that struck me as someone navigating high school by herself,” said Omar, a teacher of 20 years. “She was getting herself to school and home on her own, and was always working a job during high school.”

Omar said Juarez impressed her to the point that after her 2022 graduation, she hired her former student to tutor her two sons in Spanish. Years later, Juarez remains a close family friend, picking the boys up sometimes for adventures such as Sky Zone. Omar called the predicament heartbreaking.

“As a teacher we pour into our students and our dream is they go on to thrive in our community,” she said. “When you have kids like Mariana that have this incredible talent and bravery and drive … what’s better to have in a community than that?”

While at Central, Juarez knew she wanted to go to college, the first in her family to do so, and dived into research.

What she didn’t know until it was too late, said her attorney Roxana Cortes-Mills, was that in the fall of 2018 an immigration court had sent notice of a hearing to a residence she had shared with her mom.

Cortes-Mills said she found the notice in Juarez’s official immigration file marked as undeliverable and “return to sender.”

Juarez did not show up at the hearing, and an Omaha immigration judge on Oct. 24, 2018, ordered her removed from the country.

“She was 17 years old,” a minor under Nebraska and federal law, said Cortes-Mills, legal director for the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement. “That hearing happened. She didn’t attend. She didn’t know.”

No lawful status, no pilot’s license

As Mariana explored her dream career, she said she learned she could not obtain a U.S. pilot’s license without a lawful status.

In 2022, she sought assistance from CIRA (formerly known as Immigrant Legal Center) and the nonprofit’s legal experts explained consequences of the removal order. They said she was beyond eligibility for special immigrant juvenile status for minors deemed by a court to have been abused or abandoned by a parent.

 A subsequent effort to reopen Juarez’s case due to not receiving the hearing notice was denied April 24, 2024, according to Board of Immigration Appeals records. Cortes-Mills said the legal team did not pursue a further challenge based upon a new high court ruling that at the time seemed to rule out a chance.

That year, federal officials did offer a form of relief to Juarez  — a temporary stay of removal, which she said allowed her to obtain work authorization while in college and cleared the way for a private pilot license in 2025. She said a private license is a step toward her commercial license.

This summer, however, immigration officials denied Juarez another extension for a third year on the stay of removal.

Homeland Security officials, in response to a request for comment, offered a three-paragraph statement that pointed to the immigration court’s 2018 removal order. A spokesperson’s email said Juarez and her mother had applied for admission through the San Ysidro Port of Entry and that neither had legal documents to enter the U.S.

The department, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in January claimed “an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations” in the first year since Trump returned as president in 2025. Homeland Security said the crackdown set the stage to break more records and save taxpayer dollars. 

Juarez — faced with a U.S. future without a work permit, driver’s license and risk of detention — said her $400 Mexico-bound ticket is set for early September. 

Tearing up, the UNO grad who had started working at CIRA greeting clients, said leaving is not her preference but that she knew each renewal of a stay of removal was uncertain. She said she appreciates the friends she’s made and her U.S. education.

Her UNO degree reflects a concentration in air transport administration, and she hopes while in Mexico to validate her training thus far and resume her quest to be a professional commercial pilot.

Juarez, whose roots are in the southwest Mexican state of Guerrero, recalls visiting an airport as a child and seeing the joy on people’s faces as a plane connected them to family or adventure.

“Since I was a kid, I didn’t see myself being anything else,” she said. “I wanted to be in the sky.”

Sitting in university aviation classes dominated by males strengthened her resolve. Juarez said she became more motivated.

One “extreme” to the next? 

Bacon — who has been in the national spotlight as one of a small number of  Republicans in Congress critical of the president, but who also said he has learned to pick his battles — said he sees “no goodness” in ousting Juarez. Bacon said his staff worked many hours on her case.

He cited a recent Gallup poll, which showed that 73% of Americans believe immigration is a “good thing” for the country.  That share slipped from a record high of 79% last year, but remains above the 25-year trend average of 67%, the pollster in July said of its June telephone survey.

Bacon said the “real issue” is an outdated system of immigration laws and policies. He said “we went from one extreme” under Joe Biden to “another extreme” under Donald Trump. 

Bacon believes the current extreme will hurt his party in the midterms.

A backer of the stalled Dignity Act of 2025, Bacon wants Congress to create a path for contributing and working migrants to legally stay. That bipartisan bill, championed by Rep. Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, and Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat, drew support from across party lines and multiple states, offering border protections, asylum and immigration reforms but no amnesty or citizenship to those who entered illegally.

“We can put a little common sense and humanity into the equation,” Bacon said.

Bryan Slone, former chief executive of the statewide Nebraska Chamber of Commerce & Industry who currently is a pilot trainee, continues to work on workforce issues and touts an overhaul of the immigration system as a way to help the state’s labor shortage.

A registered nonpartisan, Slone considers talented yet undocumented migrants schooled in Nebraska a smart recruitment and retention pool, and he urges bipartisan solutions. 

“We still have the ‘brain drain’ issue and we still have the declining birth rate issue that we’ve been talking about for four or five years,” he said.

Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonpartisan think-tank, said part of the conversation often missing is what happens to migrants after they return or are removed to their homeland.

He said brain drain, or exodus of young educated talent, can be viewed as “brain gain” for the other side.

Ruiz Soto said the Mexican government, for example, has tried to “make the most of this brain gain.” Among reintegration resources it offers is the “Mexico te abraza” (Mexico embraces you) program. Returning or deported nationals at various reentry points can access support ranging from food to employment assistance.

Juarez said she hopes her journey will inspire young immigrants with U.S. voting power to speak out on issues facing their community. 

With her eye on a flight program in Mexico, she said she will “keep chasing my dreams,” albeit in a country other than the U.S.