LEGAL TEMPEST THREATENS TO BREAK UP FAMILY
By Timothy Pratt
Las Vegas Sun
mpest-us-law-threatens-scatter-family/
Feb 25 2009
Four years ago, when she was 10, Patricia Sarkisian wrote a letter
to President George W. Bush asking why her two older sisters were
jailed in Los Angeles, an order of deportation pushing them toward
a flight to Moscow any day.
Now she’s no longer "just a kid," as she signed off that letter, and
as of Feb. 2, another family member is in jail, awaiting deportation —
her mother, Anoush.
Her sisters, Emma, now 22, and Mariam, a year younger, were saved from
that fate in January 2005, by a cinematic, highly unusual last-minute
call from Sen. Harry Reid to then-Secretary of Homeland Security
Tom Ridge. Reid asked Ridge to "put personal attention" on the case,
which had caught the attention of the media and the public.
Now the Sarkisian family is again in the news, an unfortunate example
of the situation faced by an estimated 2 million families in the United
States: Some members of those families are born here, others become
citizens over time, some remain in limbo, and still others find no
legal recourse; the only thing keeping them from being deported is
the inability of the federal government to find them.
With an increased emphasis on enforcement, both in workplaces and
in neighborhoods, more of those people — like Anoush Sarkisian —
are being found and deported. A consequence is that more of those
families are ripped apart.
Federal officials found the 50-year-old through a circuitous route. In
May 2007, a car hit hers in the rear. Months later she and the other
driver engaged lawyers. In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agents contacted the defendant in the case and discovered the place
and time of Sarkisian’s deposition. On Feb. 2, outside a Rancho Drive
law office, several agents ordered Sarkisian out of her car and into
handcuffs, in front of Emma, who looked on, stunned. The mother of
five, who suffers from diabetes, has been held in the North Las Vegas
jail since that day.
To immigration attorney Peter Ashman, in cases like that of the
Sarkisians, where a family is involved and the person of interest to
the federal government has no criminal history, no national interest
is being served by deportation.
"One of the pronounced reasons we have immigration law … is to
unite families," said Ashman, former head of the local chapter of
the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Here we’re achieving
the opposite."
Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
said the federal government is just enforcing the law.
"This woman has been under a final order of deportation for a decade
… We had been unable to locate her. Now we intend to carry it out."
For the family, the idea of someone being suddenly detained is
nothing new.
In 2005 Emma and Mariam were catapulted in a similar stunning fashion
from being teenage hands in their father’s family pizza business at
a suburban strip mall to the glare of national media attention.
Their story began years earlier however. Rouben Sarkisian, their
father, had come to the United States with Anoush in the early
1990s. They had three daughters together. He divorced Anoush and
remarried a U.S. citizen, entering a path to citizenship and, he
thought, putting his two older daughters on the same path. Anoush
sought political asylum from the U.S. government, being a native
Armenian claiming persecution from Russians in the Ukraine. She lost,
appealed, the years piled onand when the appeal was denied in 1999,
she was ordered deported. She stayed, unwilling to leave her daughters.
Rouben shared the job of raising them. When he took his two eldest
daughters to immigration authorities in July 2004 to inquire about
their status, the girls were arrested and sent to a cell in Los
Angeles.
The idea that teens who had spent most of their lives in the United
States could be sent to a country, Armenia, to which they had no
connection, and separated from their parents and sisters seemed
outrageous to many people.
After several weeks of dramatic back-and-forth, including a federal
judge at one point ordering the jail to give the teens access to
cell phones to communicate with family, Reid’s call saved them. The
federal government exercised its discretion to offer what’s known
as humanitarian relief. Four years later the young women still have
no legal status, but they’re allowed to stay in this country as
long as they check in with local Homeland Security officials on a
regular basis.
They both have been attending college and spending more time with
family at home, since their father sold his pizzeria and now spends
part of the year in the Ukraine on business trips.
Rouben has also finally become a U.S. citizen and petitioned for
his older daughters to do the same. But that will take years to
complete. So his daughters can’t petition for their mother, and
neither can Rouben, because he is no longer married to her.
The eldest of the U.S.-born daughters, Michelle, could petition
for Anoush to become a citizen, but only after she turns 21 — in
four years.
Meanwhile, Anoush waits in jail, refusing to sign a form that would
give the federal government permission to seek travel documents from
the Armenian government, a move her attorney says makes no sense
because the country didn’t even exist when she left it 20 years ago.
Four of the sisters sat on a dark blue leather couch in their northwest
valley home on a recent afternoon, awaiting their mother’s daily
calls from jail. Her lawyer, Arsen V. Baziyantis, says he tried to
get Anoush to sign a form that would allow her to have visitors, but
she refused because she didn’t want her daughters to see her in jail.
Michelle, sitting in the middle, says she misses her mother’s
advice and her strictness with teenage girl issues such as boys,
and with homework. To her right sits Patricia, the letter writer,
silent. Mariam strokes her hair. The 21-year-old says her mother is
"kind of like a fortune teller. She knows what you want, when you
want it." Without her at home, "it feels colder."
On a wall across the living room, a framed certificate names Elizabeth
"student of the month" for March 2004. She’s now 16.
She looks up, as if she senses the hour, about 3 p.m. She remembers
a daily ritual, tears welling in her dark eyes.
"(My mom) calls me on my cell every day after school. She asks how I
am. She calls each of us, one by one, wherever she is. When I heard
that she was in jail, I couldn’t believe it. I kept calling her. She
didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe she was gone."