Marco's Journey: As others sleep, a Nebraska high schooler survives the graveyard shift

SCHUYLER – His eyes are tired from scanning the conveyor belt. His feet and back are sore after hours of standing in his steel-toed boots. His brain is fried from searching for faulty welding and chipped paint on the more than 1,000 metal pieces that whiz past him on the belt during the graveyard shift.

Marco Gutiérrez has spent the past eight hours inspecting tiny parts that will become car seats in Ford F-150s and Chevy Malibus.

Before that, he put in a shift at Panda Express, cooking batches of fried rice and crispy orange chicken.

It's now 7 a.m. on a Wednesday. The sun is starting to peek out over the Camaco manufacturing plant in Columbus.

Marco has been working for nearly 15 hours. Now it's time to go to school.

A senior at Schuyler Central High School, Marco is one of the dozens – maybe hundreds – of Schuyler students who work long, demanding jobs when most Nebraska teenagers sleep.

In communities across the state and country, in places where meatpacking or manufacturing are an economic backbone, immigrant teenagers do this middle-of-the night work, jobs often unknown to their teachers and principals.

They work to send money back home to their families – 20-year-old Marco sends paychecks to his parents in Guatemala. They work to pay back whoever helped them journey to the border. They work to cover legal fees, rent, food for their younger siblings.

Marco and many others here are stuck in immigration limbo, waiting for judges to decide whether to grant them asylum or refugee status. With the election of Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations, their future in Nebraska feels to them like it could vanish any instant.

No one at Schuyler Central knows how many students work full-time jobs. A former principal estimates 40. Teachers guess as high as 200 – nearly a third of the school's 623 students.

It's obvious when they haven't had much rest, teachers say. The teenagers start to look like old men, droopy with exhaustion.

Jazmyn Flores has watched her students sleep through first period, their bodies aching from working all night in a factory or bone weary from after-school construction jobs.

She wakes them up and wonders, "How are they going to learn?"

***

Marco has one hour between work and the first school bell.

He starts his 20-minute commute back to Schuyler, a stuffed panda keychain dangling from the rearview mirror – a gift from Panda Express when he took the second job a few months ago.

Marco steers toward a light blue house on a tree-lined street, where his older sister, her husband, and their three children live together on the second floor. Marco shares a room with his 18-year-old nephew.

He creeps through the quiet house, his footsteps creaking on the old floorboards, as he tries not to wake his baby nephew. His sister, too, slumbers before the afternoon shift slicing meat at Cargill.

He pulls on his black jacket, grabs his backpack, tiptoes down to the front door and, just before 8 a.m., hitches a ride to class.

Schuyler has transformed since 1980, morphing from a mostly white town of roughly 4,000 people to a mostly immigrant community of 6,547.

Drawn by jobs at the Cargill meatpacking plant, immigrants have reshaped Schuyler into a city nearly three-quarters Latino. Downtown is a mix of Mexican, Central American and African grocery stores and restaurants sharing the same streets as old dive bars and a Knights of Columbus hall.

Nearly a third of Colfax County residents are foreign born, the highest percentage in the state.

Cargill and plants in nearby Columbus and Madison have changed the school district, too. Schuyler's schools have grown by about 500 kids since 2006, reaching 1,984 last year. Of those, 45% of students are learning English as a second language, highest in the state.

Marco gets to school and takes his classroom seat in the back row under bright fluorescent lights. It's first period. Biology.

His eyelids start drooping 15 minutes in. His head bobs up and down, as he drifts to sleep and blinks back awake while the teacher talks about membranes and molecules, diffusion and osmosis.

His teacher, Katelyn Wiegand, doesn't know that Marco works two jobs. He's never told her.

***

Marco boarded a bus alone to get to Nebraska. It took him from his home country of Guatemala, north through Mexico, to the border where he crossed into El Paso.

The journey took two weeks. He was 17.

He didn't attend school for two years before that. He worked full-time construction in Guatemala, but made little money. His parents are old, he says, no longer able to work.

"I decided to come here to make a better life for me and my family," he said in Spanish through a translator. "They need my money to survive."

After two weeks riding the bus through Mexico, he presented himself to Border Patrol agents and became one of the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who enter the U.S. every year seeking asylum.

The government put him on a plane to Nebraska. His sister in Schuyler would be his guardian.

The U.S. allows children from Central America to live and work in the U.S. as they await immigration decisions – a 2008 move meant to protect them from dangerous border crossings or getting stranded in Mexican border towns like Ciudad Juarez. But the red tape is so tangled that even Marco doesn't fully understand his path to staying in the country.

When he moved to Nebraska, Marco joined the ranks of the 553,322 minors placed with a sponsor or guardian in the U.S. from 2015 to 2023.

He became one of the 223 placed in Schuyler.

He enrolled in school, a requirement for minors entering the country. Barely speaking any English, he started as a sophomore, surrounded by classmates who spoke Spanish, Arabic, French, Burmese and indigenous Central American dialects.

Marco is now 20, older than a typical senior. In Nebraska, students can be enrolled in school until they're 21. He's improved his English so much that he's now in class with native English speakers. He's on track to graduate in the spring.

"When I got him two years ago, he knew nothing ... And he began pushing himself," Flores said. "He said, 'I want to learn.'...Marco is a clear example that if you put your mind into it, you will do it. You will achieve it."

He secured his work papers, allowing him to work legally in the U.S. His future now lies in the hands of the Omaha immigration court, which during a recent nine-month period granted only 3% of applicants asylum – the lowest approval rate in the country.

"It's not a happy statistic," for asylum seekers like Marco, said Kevin Ruser, who heads the immigration clinic at the Nebraska College of Law.

By second period, Marco stands before his U.S. government class and recites a presentation in English about Barack Obama, hands shoved into his jacket pockets. His teacher Mrs. Blaser helps him along as he stumbles on tricky-to-pronounce words, like "subsequently" or "finance regulation."

He walks hallways papered with posters celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Fliers pasted on the walls announce the theater department's bilingual play.

Marco's third period teacher Mrs. Lickai spends the class corralling missing assignments before they start their next unit on a novel about the Wild West.

Marco, like many Schuyler seniors, is on a half-day schedule, which lets them attend core classes and work.

He's been working full-time for two years – juggling these things feels normal now. But he wishes he could be on the soccer team. Or that he could play saxophone in the band.

Last year, his class went on a college visit to Wayne State. In a building lobby, there was a grand piano. Marco sat down and started playing a flowing ballad from memory.

Clarissa Eloge, his teacher, watched, spellbound.

She had Marco in two back-to-back classes that year. Sometimes he'd fall asleep, exhausted. She'd let him nap – Marco is a smart kid who always caught up easily.

But she had no idea he plays piano, saxophone, trumpet, drums, bass guitar and a merengue percussion instrument called the güira.

Or, that on weekends when he's not working, he dons a suit jacket and plays piano in his Pentecostal church's band.

When Marco finished playing the ballad that day at Wayne State, Eloge started to ask him about all this, and he started to answer.

My dream, he told her, is to share what I love with other people.

My dream is to be a music teacher at a school like Schuyler.

***

Marco stands before his last class of the day, giving a presentation on global warming. Behind him, the Mexican and Guatemalan flags hang above the chalkboard.

His public speaking class of Spanish speakers practices English in speeches and writes thank you cards to teachers as Thanksgiving approaches.

His teacher in this class, Flores, noticed him when he first arrived at school in the fall of 2022.

He was in a foreign place, surrounded by strangers and an unfamiliar language.

She helped him feel comfortable. She also helped him, this year, get his second job at Panda Express. She works there, too, as a weekend manager.

As he goes through his slides, she helps him along with hard-to-pronounce words.

"The use of ... pesticides?" he says, looking in her direction. She nods at him as the word comes out right. "... are destroying our environment," he finishes.

"A week late," she says. "But you did it."

Flores sees herself in students like Marco. Sixteen years ago, she was Marco.

Flores came to Schuyler alone as a 19-year-old, when the school was still adjusting to an immigrant influx.

She spent her nights working in factories. After eight years, she saved enough money to go to college and became a teacher.

She knows these students' reality.

"You're going to be in pain. Your hands are going to hurt. Your feet are going to hurt. Your back is going to be killing you the next day. And teachers don't know that," she said.

New students arrive every month, Eloge said. Some will leave at the end of the year, finding a job in a faraway city, or moving to nearby Columbus where finding housing is easier, or returning to their home country because life in Nebraska wasn't what they imagined.

Her goal is to help students feel comfortable speaking English by the time they graduate, but four years isn't enough time to get someone fully proficient, she said.

In the days after the election, a student told Flores he was giving up on everything. With Donald Trump promising to send people like him away, he said, what's the point?

"We're going to be deported," he told her.

Teachers, administrations and advocacy groups here are planning for this reality. What happens if there's an ICE raid? What's the plan if students return home from school and their parents are gone?

Flores tries to keep kids like Marco focused on the future. Graduate, she says. Go to college. Get off the overnight shift.

"I keep telling them, guys, you don't want to do this for the rest of your life."

***

The last bell of Marco's day rings – he has five hours between school and his next Panda Express shift.

He will sleep, arise, drive back to Columbus, spend another six hours cooking at Panda.

He'll clock out, change his work uniform in the car, drive two miles to his graveyard shift.

In the gravel Camaco parking lot, he grabs his steel-toed boots and long-sleeved shirt, his ear plugs and goggles to shield his ears and eyes in the factory.

It's nearly 11 p.m now. The start of another night standing at a conveyor belt, inspecting pieces of metal that will become car seats.

All over Schuyler and Columbus and Madison, his classmates are heading to their jobs at Cargill, Camaco, Tyson.

In the morning, they'll go back to school.

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