Las Vegas Sun
Jan 28 2005
Reid’s phone call to Ridge spurs LV sisters’ release from federal
custody
By Timothy Pratt
<[email protected]>
LAS VEGAS SUN
The Las Vegas teens who have spent the last two weeks detained in Los
Angeles pending deportation to Armenia were scheduled to arrive at
McCarran International Airport this morning.
Last night 18-year-old Emma Sarkisian and her 17-year-old sister,
Mariam, were told they would be freed and got the word back to their
family and lawyers.
Family, friends and strangers who rallied behind the family are
expected to be celebrating their return into the evening. This
morning, the girls’ Russian-speaking father, Rouben Sarkisian, who
runs Tropicana Pizza in Henderson, said through an interpreter that
today it will be “free pizza for everybody!”
Then he laughed and admitted he doesn’t know exactly how he and his
daughters will celebrate their reunion after the emotional roller
coaster of the last two weeks.
“I will see how they feel and what they want to do,” he said. He
added that he understood many residents of the Las Vegas Valley might
want to greet the sisters — whose photos and stories have been in
the media nonstop since their Jan. 14 detention — so he would
probably bring them by the pizzeria this afternoon.
Their freedom had been won, said one of their lawyers, Jeremiah Wolf
Stuchiner, “apparently due to the intervention of (Secretary of
Homeland Security) Tom Ridge,” whom Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., had
asked in a phone call Wednesday to give the case “personal
attention.”
That sort of phone call has rarely, if ever, occurred to stop an
order of deportation, which is “like a death sentence” in its legal
finality, said Stuchiner, who has worked on immigration issues for
nearly 50 years, first as a federal official and then as a lawyer.
Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
said “a collective decision had been reached … to use our
discretionary authority and grant a deferred action on the case.”
That means the sisters still have no legal status and will have their
case reviewed on an ongoing basis, she said.
Several immigration experts said the case drew attention to a larger
problem, with thousands of children facing deportation because of the
actions of their parents.
Jeanne Butterfield, executive director for the American Immigration
Lawyers Association, a Washington-based group that has 9,000 members
nationwide, said “the case illustrates that we need changes in our
law — especially for minors who are having trouble with their legal
status through no fault of their own.”
But Thursday night at Tropicana Pizza the mood was giddy.
The restaurant had been ground zero for the growing public campaign
in support of the girls in recent weeks. Their framed photos sat on
the counter, behind two sheets of paper with phone numbers for
members of Congress and immigration officials.
Michelle Sarkisian, 13, stood outside the pizzeria around 8:45 p.m.,
exchanging text messages via cell phone with Mariam.
Though the scene was typical American tech, the pizzeria in a mall,
the surrounding suburbs, it arose from a labyrinth of immigration
law, international diplomacy and Capitol Hill maneuvers.
Mariam was hiding in the federal holding tank’s shower and using the
cell phone that had been forbidden to her to tell her sister she was
due to be freed.
“We’re coming home tomorrow!” Mariam wrote.
The case had turned on a series of events stretching back more than a
decade. Rouben Sarkisian arrived in the United States in 1991 and had
three more daughters with his wife, Anoush. He then divorced his
wife, married a U.S. citizen, and through that marriage gained the
status of legal resident — the step below citizenship. He later
divorced the U.S. woman.
But Sarkisian never gained any legal status for his oldest daughters,
though he has said on several occasions that he thought he had. He
even took them to a Las Vegas immigration office in July to obtain
the paperwork he thought would show their status, in order to obtain
a driver’s license for Emma.
That visit set in motion the steps that led to the Jan. 14 detention
of the girls. Immigration officials said they had been ordered
deported in 1993 and were just following the law.
The Sarkisians’ lawyers argued that the government should give Rouben
a few months to finally become a citizen, which would then give him
the right to petition for his daughters to become legal residents.
Now that they are being released, the lawyers will withdraw their
writ of habeas corpus still before Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston
at the George Federal Building, since “the purpose of the habeas was
to stop detention and have them released,” Stuchiner said.
Rouben Sarkisian said Thursday’s events, as well as the two weeks
before, had been “like life — one time up, one time down.”
That up and down included placing an advertisement in recent days to
sell the pizzeria, since he thought he would need money “to fight to
keep my daughters here.”
Thursday night, he didn’t know whether he would still try to sell the
business. “The girls have worked hard in the pizzeria and … and
being together is what drives the business,” he said.
Rouben said it was hard to focus on the future for now. He reviewed
the day’s events, which began at 9 a.m. when he had attended a
hearing at the George Federal Building and was told the girls would
not be released to his custody while Johnston decided in the coming
weeks whether they would be deported.
“I thought it was over,” he said. Then the sisters themselves were
told they would be freed in the afternoon, news that eventually got
back to Las Vegas only because a member of their legal team, lawyer
Troy Baker, called them to brief them on the results of the hearing.
Baker had been given a phone number to reach the teens in their
detention cell because Johnston had ordered the federal government to
give lawyers access to the girls.
“I called them about 6 p.m. to tell them where we were going from
here, after their release had been denied,” Baker said.
“But while I was on the phone, someone told them they would be set
free. I told them, ‘Don’t start jumping up and down until I confirm
this.’ ”
Baker said the girls had been told several times in recent days that
they had lost the legal battle and would be sent back to Armenia,
even though no decision had been made. The girls were born in Armenia
but don’t speak its language and have no family there, the Sarkisians
have said.
Baker said he didn’t want them to be given incorrect information
again.
Stuchiner, who Baker said has an impressive “black book,” made a few
phone calls Thursday night and confirmed the news about the release.
The Sarkisian case had already brought surprises, including twice
turning the sisters back from flights to Moscow within hours of
take-off — once due to an administrative order and once due to a
judge’s order.
A retired Armenian archbishop in Los Angeles whose diocese has an
estimated 600,000 followers had also been lobbying Armenian and U.S.
authorities to let the girls go. And — in what the lawyers said was
the key to the release — dozens of local residents let their
congressmen know they thought the sisters should be with their
family.
Rouben said Thursday night that he did not blame anybody and was not
bitter about what his family had been through in recent weeks.
“I think everybody tried to do what they were supposed to do,” he
said.
“And in the end, common sense and good people — they prevail in
America.”