At Centro Presente, a support agency for Boston-area Central American refugees, an E1 Salvadoran explains his predicament to Jennifer Gordon '87. He tells her he came to America four years ago and has just received a phone call informing him that his wife and two young children were arrested while trying to cross the border between Mexico and Texas.

He tells her that he lives in a three-room house with 13 other people, five of whom are small children. One of the children has lead poisoning. The landlord is trying to evict the group, but the refugee doesn't have anywhere to move. He speaks no English, and is afraid that he's going to be fired.

He has no money, no idea how to get his wife and children--one of whom is ill--out of detention in Texas, and no idea how to fit them into his overcrowded house if he does get his family out of detention and into Boston. And, while the man has been in America for four years without getting caught, he is here illegally, as an undocumented alien.

For Gordon to meet a refugee like this man is not unusual. She says, "People often come into Centro Presente in really desperate situations."

In a situation like this one, Gordon, as a paralegal, would help the man to get his wife and children out of detention. She might also see if the social services or educational components of Centro Presente might help him.

Gordon and the other paralegals, several of them Harvard students and all of them fluent in Spanish, primarily help Central American refugees, who have been arrested for being undocumented, deal with the American legal process.

"They have no awareness of what our legal system is like. They've only a known a corrupt legal system, and initially, they have no reason to trust me at all," Gordon says. Slowly, Gordon builds their trust, explains to them their options, and if they so choose, helps them apply for political asylum in the United States.

But the odds of Central American aliens receiving asylum are extremely slim--Gordon says the government rejects 98 percent of the Guatemalans and 97 percent of the E1 Salvadorans. More than half of those applicants from the Soviet Union, Poland, and Libya are accepted, says Jean Butterfield, legal coordinator for Centro Presente.

Not one of Centro Presente's clients has ever been deported. "So long as a refugee has a political asylum case in progress, they can't deport him. And when we lose, then we can appeal the case, and so long as the appeal is still in process, they have to let him stay," Gordon says. "We appeal all the cases. The appeals process is our only weapon--we are able to use the slow judicial process to buy time."

Gordon spends about 15 hours per week at Centro Presente, and says she is currently helping eight or nine clients who are fighting to gain political asylum.

"It's strange to have a real-life job. This is really these peoples' lives. If you don't get that application in, it might really affect their lives, they might even be deported," the Dunster House resident says. "I have a constant horror, a constant fear that if I do something wrong it could really affect them."

When Gordon started working for Centro Presente in June, 1985, there were almost no Harvard students involved in the group. Now, more than half a dozen students serve as paralegals at the organization, Butterfield says.

"It's because of Jennifer that a lot of Harvard students work here now. She's advertised our legal program a lot, and very successfully," says Sister Rose Mary Cummins, co-founder of Centro Presente.

"Jennifer is really one of the mainstays of the program," Butterfield says. "She's active in all levels--she helps to train paralegals, she's on the search committee which is choosing a new lawyer--she's really involved in all aspects."

Gordon has combined her extracurricular interests explicitly with her academic ones. A special concentrator in Latin American Studies, she is particularly interested in the problems of refugees.