Two Las Vegas Girls Are Deported to Armenia

KLAS-tv.com (Las Vegas, Nevada)
January 18, 2005

By Atle Erlingsson, Reporter (aerlingsson@klastv.com)

Two local teenaged girls are headed for Armenia, a country completely
foreign to them. They grew up here and are completely Americanized, but
federal immigration says they’re not legal residents and must leave. The
family told Eyewitness News their heart-wrenching story.

Fourteen years ago the girls and their mother fled the former Soviet
Union seeking asylum in the United States. They were denied and ordered
to leave but ultimately slipped through the cracks and were able to
establish a new life here. They became a successful and productive
family. Now, years later the government is breaking the family bonds.

The pain is so deep. Ruben Sarkisian can only cry. His two oldest
daughters, 18-year-old Emma and 17-year-old Miriam, have been taken
away. Federal immigration officials detained the girls as they tried to
gain residency Friday at the Las Vegas office of the U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services, or USCIS. They are now in Los Angeles just
hours away from being flown to Armenia.

Ruben Sarkisian said, “We never had an opportunity to say goodbye to
each other, and it’s just so difficult to describe for me.”

Sarkisian is safe to stay here. He married an American woman although
later divorced. The three younger sisters are also okay because they
were born here. But Emma and Miriam have no such protection. They are
two American teenagers forced to return to Armenia, a country completely
foreign to everything they know.

“They don’t know how to write. They don’t know how to speak. There is
nobody who will take care of them there. And I have no idea how I can
help them,” Ruben said.

The federal government says there is little the Sarkisian’s can do.

The family’s attorney, Jerry Stuchiner, is baffled the girls aren’t
being allowed to stay and become residents, especially after so many
years in the country. “These girls are not terrorists. They’re not
criminals. They’re girls,” Stuchiner said.

Immigration and customs enforcement officials declined to speak on
camera about this case. They say they’re simply following the law. The
girls were denied asylum and must be deported.

There are many complicated and tangled legal issues that are too
difficult for a 13-year-old girl, like Michelle, to understand. She just
wants her older sisters to come home. “I don’t understand. They didn’t
do anything wrong. They just wanted to be successful like you and
everybody else. They didn’t do anything. Like, why they were taken? I
don’t understand,” she stated.

Sarkisian has no way of contacting his daughters who will soon to be
thousands of miles away with nothing but the clothes on their backs. “I
feel like my family is being destroyed because we are nothing without
these girls. We are just one piece and this is how we’ll always be,”
Rueben said.

They are a family of six, physically broken apart with little hope in
sight. What’s even more painful for the family is the father, who owns a
local Tropicana Pizza restaurant, is just months, possibly weeks, away
from establishing full citizenship.

If the government waited for that, the girls would then be allowed to
stay. But once in Armenia, they will have to file all new paperwork,
which could take years.

USCIS falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security. It was formerly known as INS, or Immigration and
Naturalization Services.

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