Las Vegas Sun
Jan 27 2005

Sisters facing deportation to remain in custody

Judge denies request to release Vegas teens while immigration case is
decided
By Timothy Pratt
<timothy@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston ruled this morning that he
could not order that two Las Vegas teens be released from an
immigration cell in Los Angeles.

“It’s a heartbreak for me,” Las Vegas resident Rouben Sarkisian said
at the George Federal Building after learning that his daughters,
Emma and Mariam, would not be released into his custody.

Johnston told lawyers for the Sarkisians this morning that he could
find no legal basis to return the girls to their family in Las Vegas
while their deportation case is decided.

“I have to have the law, have to have some authority” to issue such
an order, Johnston said. “As I read the law I don’t have any
authority.”

Johnston did order immigration officials to allow Rouben to visit his
daughters in Los Angeles. He also said that Mariam must be kept
separate from adult detainees because she is a minor, but added that
he didn’t want the sisters split up.

Johnston will allow the family’s lawyers to file additional briefs by
Feb. 2 and will then schedule a hearing to determine if the girls
will be deported.

In the meantime, the family is hoping for possible intervention from
the top levels of the federal government. On Wednesday, Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge and asked for “personal attention” in the
Sarkisian case.

David Thronson, one of two directors at the Boyd School of Law’s
Immigration Law Clinic at UNLV, said Reid’s phone call was an unusual
move.

“It is not unprecedented, but it is really rare to get a senator’s
direct attention” in an immigration case of this sort, he said.

“We have a large, bureaucratic, unresponsive system, and there are
cases where some kind of dramatic intervention is needed to get the
attention of that system,” Thronson said.

Tessa Hafen, spokeswoman for Reid, said the senator “is fairly
confident this will reach resolution,” with the girls being allowed
to stay in the country while their father, Rouben, who is a legal
resident of the United States, takes the next step and becomes a
citizen.

If he becomes a citizen, he can petition for his daughters to gain
legal status.

Hafen said the case caught Reid’s attention because “the girls are
being punished for something that is not their fault.”

The developments in the nearly 2-week-old case came as the girls
spoke to the Sun from their Los Angeles cell and said their morale
was flagging.

Emma, who is 18, said she had been told Wednesday by a supervisor at
the cell that a stay ordered by Johnston on Jan. 19 had been lifted,
and that they would soon be deported to Armenia — the birthplace of
the girls, but a country now unknown to them after growing up in the
United States.

But no decision has been reached on the stay. Immigration officials
did not return a call seeking comment on the alleged announcement
made to the girls.

“I just hope the senator will help us out, because if I’m in here
another week, I’ll go crazy,” Emma said.

This morning’s ruling means she will remain in custody for at least
another week.

She said her younger sister, Mariam, who is 17, “is starting to
break.” Then Emma began crying.

The girls are able to call family, friends and members of the media
by using calling cards they buy at the immigration holding cell.

Mariam said she “stares at the wall” all day, and that she misses her
2-month-old pit bull, Titi. She said she doesn’t speak to her three
younger sisters — all of whom were born in the United States — when
she and Emma call Las Vegas.

“If I do, I’m going to cry,” she said.

The case turns on a series of events stretching back more than a
decade.

Rouben and Anoush Sarkisian — the parents of the girls — arrived in
the United States in 1991 with Emma and Mariam. They had three more
daughters. They were divorced and Rouben gained his legal status
after marrying a U.S. citizen. That marriage later broke apart.

Anoush never gained legal status, according to immigration officials.

In 1993, a deportation order was issued for the two girls.

During the 1990s each parent attempted to gain legal status for their
two oldest daughters, but both attempts failed when the earlier order
was discovered. An appeal dragged the process out, according to
Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the federal agency, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

But Rouben has said in recent days that he thought otherwise and
attempted to obtain proof of the girls’ status in July, only to be
told of the deportation order. It took until some time shortly before
Jan. 14 for immigration authorities to obtain travel permits for the
girls from the Armenian Consulate in Los Angeles, at which point the
girls were detained.

But the family’s lawyers won a stay against their departure and are
seeking humanitarian consideration in allowing the girls to stay in
the country while their father obtains citizenship.

For Kice, the case, though complex, has an obvious conclusion, since
the girls “had their day in court … and failed to obtain any
(legal) benefit.”

She said the sympathy these girls have apparently gained not only in
Congress — Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas, has also shown
support, writing a letter to immigration authorities earlier this
week — but also in the public, is not the issue.

“I understand that there are people being deported every day that are
good people. But this is not a popularity contest … We are a nation
of laws and we have to obey the laws,” she said.

Immigration officials have argued against releasing the teens
because, in light of the fact that their mother is an illegal
immmigrant who has disappeared into the United States, the girls
could do the same.

But Thronson said the case “should shine a light on a broken system.”

He said there were more than 6,000 minors detained by immigration
authorities last year, many of whom were deported.

“These are children being separated from their families — families
that are separated as a result of the system even though family unity
is ostensibly its goal,” he said.

“If it’s true they’ve exhausted all their legal rights then we have
to think — should our system somehow be able to accommodate the
facts of a case like this … the fact of family?”