LV sisters’ case sheds light on immigration law

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005 | 11:09 a.m.

After a last-minute phone call from Capitol Hill freed two Las Vegas teenage sisters from a Los Angeles cell holding immigrants scheduled for deportation, Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said it was the "right result -- wrong method."

"Senators shouldn't have to pick up the phone and call cabinet-level people every time the system's hands are tied," said Butterfield, whose Washington-based organization includes 9,000 immigration lawyers nationwide.

Emma and Mariam Sarkisian were released Friday, less than 48 hours after Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge about the girls.

Butterfield said the case shows that immigration law needs to be reformed so thousands of youths such as the Sarkisians, who are "having trouble with their legal status through no fault of their own," aren't deported and separated from their families.

Advocates point to a bill known as the DREAM Act, which gives a way for young immigrants to gain residency, the step below citizenship.

The bill -- S.1545 -- got the backing of the Senate judiciary committee almost a year ago but went no further. It may be introduced again this session or included in another, larger bill, said Adam Elggren, spokesman for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who introduced the act in 2003.

But groups favoring greater enforcement of existing immigration laws say that children's immigration hassles are the fault of their parents, not the federal government.

"The moral culpability rests on the shoulders of their parents and it is not the responsibility of the American people to pay for their mistakes," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

The issue, Elggren said, is "difficult ... there's passion on both sides."

Hatch's act had 47 additional sponsors from both sides of the aisle, including Reid. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., however, did not put his name on the bill and had no comment on the matter on Tuesday.

Regardless of whether the bill survives in its most recent version or becomes a part of another one, observers said the issue of undocumented youth is not going away.

"Years and years ago there were very few unaccompanied minors (deported)," said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that detained the sisters in Las Vegas and sent them to Los Angeles Jan. 14 based on a deportation order dating to 1993.

The sisters had been living in the United States since 1991 and their father, Rouben Sarkisian, who runs a pizzeria in Henderson, had become a legal resident and said he thought that his daughters had the same status.

Now that the sisters have been released, their biggest hope for becoming legal residents is for their father to take the next step and become a citizen in the coming months. Then he can petition for his daughters' legalization.

Kice said the number of minors scheduled for deportation has grown so much over the years that the immigration agency made an agreement in April with the Health and Human Services Department to have that agency handle such issues as the medical care and education of minors while they are detained.

"The issue (of minors being deported) is continuing to get scrutiny, and it's an important and compelling one," Kice said.

At the same time, Kice said, federal immigration authorities don't keep track of how many minors are deported each year.

"While there are unique provisions made for the detention of minors ... when you're before an immigration judge there's no difference between a minor and an adult," she said.

Josh Bernstein, senior policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy and research group, said that about 65,000 high school graduates a year might qualify for the DREAM Act.

The act would cover youth who had arrived in the United States before they were 16, remained in the country for at least five consecutive years, and either earned a high school diploma or gained acceptance to college.

Bernstein said many of the young people who would be covered by the act can make economic and intellectual contributions to American society.

"Their potential to contribute is what we're foregoing (by not passing the bill)," he said. "The economic contribution they could make is in the billions of dollars. So it's not just compassion, it's ... in our own self-interest.'

The policy analyst also said cases like the Sarkisians have occurred before, where the public finds out -- usually through the media -- about minors or young adults who are about to be separated from their families and then calls for some sort of intervention.

The Sarkisian case resulted in dozens of calls, letters and e-mails to Reid's office, spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said last week.

"Whenever these cases come to public attention, everybody agrees they shouldn't be deported," Bernstein said.

But Krikorian said that the DREAM Act was "a calculated attempt to find the most sympathetic group of illegal aliens" and that minors in the country illegally deserve no special consideration.

"(The bill) is explicitly an amnesty ... (that) is not even open for discussion until we get a sustained commitment to immigration law enforcement," he said.

Hatch recently intervened in the case of an 18-year-old Utah State University student named Heilit Martinez, who discovered she was not a legal resident of the United States when she crossed over the border into Mexico while at a conference in New Mexico.

Hatch has introduced a limited bill that would fix her case and allow her to gain legal status. That bill is also pending.

Thursday night, shortly after he heard his daughters would be coming home, Rouben Sarkisian looked back on the two weeks of turmoil his family had faced.

"They (Emma and Mariam) went American. They come back American. All kids are like a source of gold for the country, and my kids are also," he said.

It remains to be seen whether members of Congress will see things the same way when it comes to thousands of other minors who are in the country illegally.