Legal tempest threatens to break up family (Las Vegas Sun)

Legal tempest threatens to break up family

By Timothy Pratt

Wed, Feb 25, 2009 (2 a.m.)

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.”