How can even the most hardened editor not go warm and fuzzy over the Gomez brothers?

The two boys were detained to be deported to their native Colombia when student friends intervened to save them, launching an online campaign, raising money and going to Congress. They won the family's release, at least for the moment. The Gomez boys, 18 and 19, were popular students, and the younger Juan was a star. He had near-perfect grades and has just entered the honor's program at Miami Dade College.

This isn't just news, it's Hollywood.

Many readers, however, see another side. The family was, after all, here illegally. As the saga unfolded over the last seven weeks, these readers complain that The Miami Herald neglected to report views critical of allowing the Gomez boys -- and thousands of illegal-immigrant students like them across the country -- to stay.

They are a cost to taxpayers, undermine respect for the law and have jumped the line on immigrants waiting to get here legally, the critics say. "There seem to be no shortage of those with (the opposing) viewpoint on The Herald's comment boards or letter page, " wrote Josh White, 28, a graduate student in sports marketing at Barry University, "yet you have not put one person representing that view into the 'objective' hard-news article(s). Why?" Good question.

So it is that this column is born. I have been asked by the editors of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald to make an independent assessment of the Gomez coverage and share it directly with you, the readers, as the first in an occasional series as an ombudsman. My job, in other words, is to represent you. Pretty pretentious.

So, who am I? I'll tell you up front, and I'll tell you my biases, for in the end what I write will necessarily be my own reasoned judgment. But I promise you it will be as fair as I can make it, never cynical, but sometimes irreverent. I strongly believe in good professional journalism, but I don't think it's Holy. You are welcome to agree, disagree or demand to kill the ump.

I have more than 30 years' experience as a journalist. This includes being a reporter for The New York Times and an editor for The Wall Street Journal, two supposed extremes on the ideological fever chart. I don't think I'm schizophrenic, but maybe masochistic. I launched my own chain of Spanish-language dailies in Texas four years ago, just as newspaper advertising began to drop. We cut the papers back to weeklies earlier this year, and I have returned to New York. I lost money. So I know the many issues newspapers face -- intimately.

Like the Gomez brothers, I am Hispanic, born in Colombia. I also was an illegal alien. My mother was naturalized, but I had failed to declare my own citizenship when I was 14, as the law required. I was 21 when an Army recruiter told me I had to leave the country. I went to court and was allowed to declare late. I joined the Army and went to Vietnam.

OK, so I didn't swim across the Rio Grande. But years later, I did sneak illegally across the border. It was at night near Tijuana with eight "undocumented" Mexicans and a smuggler. We ran from helicopters and crawled past the Border Patrol. I rode on a floorboard to San Diego. That was in 1977, which goes to show how long the trafficking has been going on. Three years later I went from Key West with Cuban Americans on a boat into Mariel Harbor in Cuba and returned 19 days later clinging to the gunwales with refugees persecuted under the Castro regime. We cried when we saw American soil.

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