Smuggled as a child from Colombia, now he's a Harvard grad and doctor
Big Town Big Dreams: Stories about immigrant New Yorkers who make this town the great place it is
Thursday, March 22 2007, 4:00 AM
James Ahern, a captain in the New York City Fire Department, was on his way to work last year when he realized that the uneasiness he felt was not the flu, as he'd thought, but something far more serious.
"It was a heart attack," he says. "I've seen enough of them in my career to know."
Ahern went to see his physician, who immediately transported him to St. Francis Hospital, The Heart Center, in Roslyn, L.I.
Within 45 minutes, a team headed by Dr. Harold Fernández was performing ultimately successful quintuple-bypass surgery on Ahern. "I just can't say enough about this guy," Ahern says. "The best [doctor] just happened to be in the room when I needed him to be there."
Ahern wasn't aware at the time that the man who had just saved his life had arrived in America - and attended Princeton University - as an undocumented immigrant.
Fernández was only 13 when his parents, already in the U.S., arranged for him and his younger brother to be smuggled there from Medellin, Colombia - a congested South American city of 3 million where children are often recruited into the deadly drug-trafficking trade.
"We left Medellin on Sept. 13, 1978," recalls the now 41-year-old Fernández, who lives with his Colombian-born wife and their two young children in Huntington, L.I.
"We made stops in Panama, Jamaica and then the Bahamas, and then went to a little island called Bimini. The plan was to cross over that night and reach Florida, where some friends would call my parents and we would get on a plane to New York."
It was hurricane season, though, and another two weeks passed before the two boys, crammed onto a small boat with a dozen other illegal immigrants, left Bimini, dodging the Coast Guard and the treacherous waters along the way.
"Each time the boat would come down," re-members Fernández, "we thought it was going to split in half. Everyone in the boat was praying and becoming sick."
Living in West New York, N.J., and understanding no English, Fernández naturally felt out of place in high school. But he was driven to buckle down in his new home, and within six months, he was transferred from English as a Second Language classes to regular classes. When he graduated, Fernández was named class valedictorian.
Academically he had everything it took to be accepted into the best colleges, but Fernández admits now that he gave Princeton phony Social Security and residency cards in order to pass as a legal U.S. resident. He lived in a cloud of fear, knowing his ruse could be discovered at any time. Then one day it was.
"I had been there about a year and a half when I got a letter from the office of the dean for foreign students, asking me to go to her office. She wanted to see my residency card," he recalls. Fernández had not only lied to get into the school but was scheduled to receive government grants to help pay for his education.
"I had broken the Princeton student code, which they're very strict about," he says.
But because he was such an exemplary student, Fernández's bid to remain at Princeton was championed not only by several professors and deans but by then-New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and Sen. Bill Bradley, both Princeton grads. The school agreed to allow him to continue studying.
"They changed my status from being a U.S. student to being a foreign student from South America. In doing that, they canceled all my grants from the government and changed them to university loans. And they also granted me a pardon."
Finally, Harold Fernández was free to pursue his dream: becoming a doctor.
"I never wanted to be anything else, from the time I was a little kid. Even though there were no doctors in my family, I always wanted to help people. But a lot of times I wouldn't tell this to people
because they wouldn't see it as a possibility."
He graduated from Princeton magna cum laude, went on to Harvard Medical School and then began an eight-year residency in surgery at the NYU Medical Center before going to work at St. Francis in 2001.
Some nine years after landing on the Florida shore, while at Harvard, Fernández became an American citizen.
Now he's writing a book about his early experiences. Fernández is calling it "Journey of Hope."
"I hope," he says, "that by other people reading my story, they at least get a feeling for the human side of this situation. There's no easy solution to the issue of immigration, but I can tell you that no one loves this country more than the immigrants who come here to look for a better life."