Editorial: Don’t break family apart

Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005 | 9:04 a.m.

Two Las Vegas girls, whose only crime was to have been brought to the United States by their father when they were 4 and 3, are being detained in a federal holding cell in Los Angeles, awaiting deportation. They've been there 11 days now. It's up to a federal magistrate to decide whether they should be separated from their family, including three other sisters, or be sent to Armenia. That is their country of birth, but, to them, it's an alien land where they have no friends or family, no language skills, no means of supporting themselves.

Only some desperate calls by their family's attorney on Jan. 17 prevented them from being forcibly boarded onto a plane. On Jan. 18 they received a reprieve when the one flight to Moscow was full. On Jan. 19, just three hours before their scheduled flight, their lawyer was successful in appealing to a federal magistrate, who granted the girls a stay while he reviewed the facts of the case.

The girls are Emma Sarkisian, 18, who graduated last June from Palo Verde High School, and her sister, Mariam, 17, a student at Palo Verde. Their parents, Rouben and Anoush Sarkisian, brought them to the U.S. in 1991. The couple had three more daughters, who, having been born here, are legal citizens. The marriage broke up and Rouben married a U.S. citizen, automatically making him a U.S. "resident" under immigration law. That marriage also broke up and the residency status of the two girls remained in limbo until last July. That month Rouben took the girls to immigration officials, hoping to confirm their status as residents. Instead, officials determined they weren't legal citizens and ordered the girls to check in with them once a month. They also began negotiating with Armenia to receive them.

As Armenia was a republic of the Soviet Union at the time of the girls' birth, officials of the now-independent republic at first disclaimed any responsibility for them. But on Jan. 14, during their monthly visit to the immigration office, the girls were told that Armenia had decided to accept them and they were whisked away to the cell in Los Angeles.

In our view, the girls should be immediately released from custody and returned to their family while awaiting the magistrate's decision. We also believe it would be a miscarriage of justice for the girls to be deported. This is the only country they've ever known. Their father erred in not applying for their residency years ago. But by any humanitarian standard, that is no reason for the girls to be traumatized by tearing them away from their family, their friends and the lives they've been living here.