Atlanta ? The FIRST international robotics championship is supposed to be about the world’s best young engineering wizards showing off their skills. But for an illegal immigrant getting a U.S. education under the threat of being deported to Africa, it meant a secret revealed.

An upset victory the East Harlem Tech robotics team took from elite New York City schools had unintended consequences for 18-year-old Amadou Ly. He had to tell his teammates about his immigration problems because he had no valid ID to board a flight to Atlanta.

“I never wanted to share this with people,” said Ly, a lanky senior from Senegal.

His teammates’ elation over the chance to compete with hundreds of teams from the U.S., Canada, Israel and Brazil turned to shock when they learned Ly would have to take an 18-hour train ride to get to the competition.

Ly and his mother came to the U.S. on a visit to New York in 2001, when he was 13. His mother knew no English but decided to overstay the tourist visa to give her son a U.S. education. About a year later, she returned to Dakar and left him in the care of a friend in Indianapolis, who soon sent the teen back to New York.

He found another Senegalese acquaintance and enrolled in high school, where he is three months shy of graduation. He dreams of studying math and computer science at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, where he’s been accepted, but doesn’t have enough money – or perhaps enough time.

Ly is in the middle of deportation proceedings that started in November 2004, after a police officer asked for his visa when he was injured in a car accident. Federal immigration officials detained him after he was treated at a hospital, he said.

Amadou Ly talks on his cell phone during a break from working on his school's entry in the First Robotic Competition in Atlanta, Thursday, March 27, 2006. Ly, member of a prize-winning robotics team from a troubled high school in New York City's East Harlem, won the trip to Atlanta that should be every student's dream. But instead, the senior who has fended for himself since age 14, is fighting deportation.