In 2012, Marco Saavedra hatched a dramatic plan with activists at the National Immigrant Youth Alliance. He and another undocumented immigrants would deliberately get themselves detained in South Florida by approaching a Customs and Border Protection station, claiming they were looking for relatives and then acknowledging they had no papers.

It worked and each was sent to detention. Once inside, they helped connect many immigrants with attorneys. They’d already been doing this kind of work from the outside but wanted to go a step further.

“The idea was like in order to escalate, why not just take on a whole detention center and maybe treat it as an entire caseload and not just an individual case-by-case basis,” Saavedra explained.

Listen to Beth Fertig's report on WNYC:

Infiltrating the detention center was the first in a series of steps that led the U.S. government to seek to deport Saavedra. On November 7th, his case will be heard by an immigration judge in New York City.

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Saavedera was three years old when he and his parents crossed the border illegally in Arizona. He was raised in New York City and won a scholarship to Kenyon College in Ohio as a foreign student (he had trouble getting into other universities because of his status). While in college, during President Barack Obama’s administration, he began protesting for passage of the DREAM act, to help undocumented young people like himself stay in the U.S.

But getting deliberately detained took his political work to another level. While inside, he claims he helped about four dozen people get released from the detention center in Broward, Florida, before authorities figured out who he was and released him. But that put him on the government’s radar and he said he was placed in removal proceedings.

That same year, President Obama enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. as children, and let them get work permits. Obama took this action after Congress failed to enact the DREAM act, which would have given these young people a path to permanent status. Saavedra still wasn’t assuaged.

“Although we had achieved such a monumental victory for, you know, now 700,000 DACA beneficiaries, there are still 11 million undocumented people in this country that don't have access to a work permit” or a drivers license. And they have to reapply for DACA every two years.

So in 2013, Saavedra and three other activists “self deported” themselves to Mexico. They connected with young undocumented people like themselves who had returned to Mexico for various reasons, to draw attention to the way they were raised as Americans but didn’t have the same legal protections and rights to work and go to college.

Days later, the three activists plus six others who were living in Mexico formed a group called the Dream Nine and headed back to the U.S. They wore graduation caps and gowns. But without legal status, their only hope of reentering was to seek asylum or humanitarian parole. Saavedra and the others were temporarily detained in Arizona and then released to pursue their cases in immigration courts.

On Thursday, Saavedra and his attorney will argue that he deserves asylum because organized crime and a crackdown on political activism make it too dangerous for him to return to Mexico.

“My lifestyle ever since I've come of age is to advocate for people that don't have the same privileges and as I do,” he said. “I don't see myself all of a sudden, you know, going into hiding or being complacent or keeping my mouth shut if I see an injustice.”

At age 29, Saavedra works at his family’s restaurant La Morada in the Bronx, a hub for immigrant activism.

Some immigration advocates thought the Dream Nine’s actions were misguided, because they put themselves at too much risk. But Marcial Godoy-Anativia, a sociocultural anthropologist and the Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, calls Saavedra a “national hero.”

Referring to the Civil Rights era, he said Saavedra’s actions at the border “should be placed alongside all those other ones that make up the hall of fame of the best civil disobedience in the U.S.”

Saavedra said one member of the Dream Nine has already gotten asylum and another won a different form of immigration relief. But the rest, like him, are still waiting for their day in court. His case will be heard the same month the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over President Trump’s decision to end DACA.

As he looks back on how much the immigration debate has changed since the Obama administration, now that the Trump administration has taken such a hard line against migrants seeking asylum and those who are undocumented, Saavedra feels lucky to have supporters. Many will join him in court.

“If anyone can have this fight, I feel like it's me because I have just so many networks of support and privileges.”

Saavedra’s activism at the Florida detention center is also the subject of a film to be released next year by Oscilloscope Laboratories called “The Infiltrators.”

Beth Fertig is a senior reporter covering courts and legal affairs at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig.