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Las Vegas: Legal Tempest Threatens To Break Up Family

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  • Las Vegas: Legal Tempest Threatens To Break Up Family

    LEGAL TEMPEST THREATENS TO BREAK UP FAMILY
    By Timothy Pratt

    Las Vegas Sun
    http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/feb/25/te 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."
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