Going extreme to pursue dream

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A popular new reality TV show offers illegal aliens a chance to win the services of a law firm to gain a "green card" -- if the contestants are willing to, among other things, eat a worm-stuffed taco.

With an estimated audience of 1 million viewers, the program -- known as "Gana la Verde" or "Win the Green" -- has become the second most watched Spanish-language television show by Hispanics 18 to 49 in the Los Angeles area.

Show winners are guaranteed the services of a noted immigration attorney for a year to apply for a government-issued green card, which gives them the right to work and permanently reside in the United States. The show's producers, Liberman Broadcasting Corp., do not guarantee a card will be issued, only that a law firm will be hired to seek one.

Liberman Broadcasting introduces each show with a video overview of six contestants battling for the green card through a maze of barbed wire along the U.S.-Mexico border, with U.S. Border Patrol helicopters shown overhead.

The prime-time program, which began in July, runs five times a week, during which contestants fight off barking dogs, eat burritos filled with beetles, jump between speeding 18-wheel trucks, are dragged by horses, wash windows on a downtown skyscraper, lie in a sealed plastic coffin with 500 rats and eat worms, including live tequila worms -- much like the NBC show "Fear Factor."

In a recent broadcast, a 24-year-old electrician who identified himself only as Roberto said he had lived illegally in the United States for four years. He tried to cross a narrow wooden beam over grimy, muck-filled water at the Port of Los Angeles. He fell.

"I was here to get my papers," he said. "But I lost."

In an Aug. 11 letter to KRCA-TV, the Los Angeles station that airs the program, several groups, including the Southern California Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the California La Raza Lawyers Association, asked that the show be canceled.

They charged that the program encouraged foreign nationals to enter the country illegally and was exploiting people with "unrealistic expectations."

"This show takes advantage of people's fears, offers them false promises, functions as a magnet to encourage people to enter this country without documentation, and makes them potential targets of our government's misguided immigration polices," said the letter, also signed by the Central American Resource Center, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles , the Immigration Section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the Latina Lawyers Bar Association and the Mexican American Bar Association.