He Is Elected Graduation Speaker. His Father Faces Possible Deportation.

NEW YORK — Two pieces of big news came at the end of May to the home of Roni Lezama and his father, Carlos.

Roni’s classmates at Millennium High School had elected him graduation speaker. Their choice was easy to understand.

“He’s very good at writing, he’s incredibly smart, and he wasn’t just studying all the time,” Stella Krajick, a classmate, said. “He always has friends with him.”

That same week in May, Carlos Lezama, 52, learned that he was to appear before a judge in October for deportation proceedings. Unlike his 18-year-old son, Lezama led a quiet, isolated life. “He’s very cautious,” Roni said. “He doesn’t go to bars because if something happens, he could be arrested.”

Lezama came to the United States from Mexico City in 1994 and stayed, a violation of immigration law that his son says is the only blemish in an otherwise law-abiding, taxpaying, flag-waving life in the country.

A quiet life does not mean a silent one. Father and son attended the new Star Wars movie in May and sat near a boy who was audibly imitating Chewbacca. After a few minutes, the mother of the boy ushered her son out. Another patron exclaimed, “Thank you! Finally!”

The Lezamas were dismayed.

“You didn’t have to be a genius to tell that the kid had a disability,” Roni said. “He wasn’t making those noises to be disruptive, he was enjoying the film like the rest of us.”

Carlos Lezama rose from his chair and spoke to the man. “'Thank you’ — for what?” he said. “You don’t have any idea what pain and struggle that family must go through.”

The encounter took place in a dark theater, unseen and unheard beyond its walls. “He didn’t do it to prove to the judge why he shouldn’t be deported,” Roni said. “He did it because he innately knew what had to be done.”

Even so, after the film ended, Roni said, his father told him he was disappointed in himself. “His mistake was not going after the family and asking them to stay, because their son did nothing wrong,” Roni said.

Roni, an only child, was born in 2000. The family moved to Flushing, Queens, from Elmhurst so their neighborhood school would be Public School 21, which had a strong reputation. Roni’s mother returned to Mexico when he was small and left his life. His father works as a driver for a veterinary practice in the city.

Congress has spent most of the last three decades not coming to terms with immigration, legal and illegal. In the absence of realistic legislation, an ad hoc web of enforcement practices grew. People who kept to the law were, by and large, left alone. That covered the vast majority of migrants who have settled and fortified American society. These practices were sundered with the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Lezama’s risk of deportation was background noise in the family’s daily life. “I always knew it was a possibility,” Roni said. “I never thought it would come to pass, because of the citizen that he is.”

In eighth grade, Roni did not get into the top three schools he selected and instead was assigned to a neighborhood school that did not appeal to him or his father. He stalled and lied to his father about the placement. “I didn’t want to disappoint him,” Roni said. His father finally found out, and as punishment for his son’s lack of candor, did not attend his middle school graduation. He also told Roni to find himself a better high school. “He said, ‘If you don’t figure this out, I will send you back to Mexico,'” Roni said. “It sounded serious. I was wasting the resources and opportunities here.”

So in the summer of 2014, he went door to door at well-ranked high schools. Colin McEvoy, the principal of Millennium, a rigorous and popular school of about 700 students in Manhattan’s financial district, invited him to join the class of 2018. It was filled with students from other countries — among them, China, Mexico, Kosovo, Nigeria — and the children of immigrants. The group was characterized by kindness, said Margaret Weisman, a teacher who spoke at last week’s graduation. Another student who spoke, Gabriel Josephs, described getting powerful support to face his dyslexia.

In his speech, Roni, who plans to attend Middlebury College, told his classmates of his family’s story — one that, he said, summoned all of them to see their own privileges as immigrants or immigrants’ children, and their duty to use those advantages for others.

That, he said, was the ultimate lesson of his father’s possible deportation.

“My father, Carlos, is undocumented. But he stands for this country,” Roni said. “He didn’t just cross from Mexico to America. He crossed the border that separates the individual and his selfish endeavors to a place that asserts, implores, putting others in front.”

The gift of Carlos Lezama was standing in front of them.

“He ran across the border,” Roni said, “so I could walk across this stage.”