Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Sisters facing deportation to remain in custody

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Johnston ruled this morning that he could not order that two Las Vegas teens be released from an immigration cell in Los Angeles.

"It's a heartbreak for me," Las Vegas resident Rouben Sarkisian said at the George Federal Building after learning that his daughters, Emma and Mariam, would not be released into his custody.

Johnston told lawyers for the Sarkisians this morning that he could find no legal basis to return the girls to their family in Las Vegas while their deportation case is decided.

"I have to have the law, have to have some authority" to issue such an order, Johnston said. "As I read the law I don't have any authority."

Johnston did order immigration officials to allow Rouben to visit his daughters in Los Angeles. He also said that Mariam must be kept separate from adult detainees because she is a minor, but added that he didn't want the sisters split up.

Johnston will allow the family's lawyers to file additional briefs by Feb. 2 and will then schedule a hearing to determine if the girls will be deported.

In the meantime, the family is hoping for possible intervention from the top levels of the federal government. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and asked for "personal attention" in the Sarkisian case.

David Thronson, one of two directors at the Boyd School of Law's Immigration Law Clinic at UNLV, said Reid's phone call was an unusual move.

"It is not unprecedented, but it is really rare to get a senator's direct attention" in an immigration case of this sort, he said.

"We have a large, bureaucratic, unresponsive system, and there are cases where some kind of dramatic intervention is needed to get the attention of that system," Thronson said.

Tessa Hafen, spokeswoman for Reid, said the senator "is fairly confident this will reach resolution," with the girls being allowed to stay in the country while their father, Rouben, who is a legal resident of the United States, takes the next step and becomes a citizen.

If he becomes a citizen, he can petition for his daughters to gain legal status.

Hafen said the case caught Reid's attention because "the girls are being punished for something that is not their fault."

The developments in the nearly 2-week-old case came as the girls spoke to the Sun from their Los Angeles cell and said their morale was flagging.

Emma, who is 18, said she had been told Wednesday by a supervisor at the cell that a stay ordered by Johnston on Jan. 19 had been lifted, and that they would soon be deported to Armenia -- the birthplace of the girls, but a country now unknown to them after growing up in the United States.

But no decision has been reached on the stay. Immigration officials did not return a call seeking comment on the alleged announcement made to the girls.

"I just hope the senator will help us out, because if I'm in here another week, I'll go crazy," Emma said.

This morning's ruling means she will remain in custody for at least another week.

She said her younger sister, Mariam, who is 17, "is starting to break." Then Emma began crying.

The girls are able to call family, friends and members of the media by using calling cards they buy at the immigration holding cell.

Mariam said she "stares at the wall" all day, and that she misses her 2-month-old pit bull, Titi. She said she doesn't speak to her three younger sisters -- all of whom were born in the United States -- when she and Emma call Las Vegas.

"If I do, I'm going to cry," she said.

The case turns on a series of events stretching back more than a decade.

Rouben and Anoush Sarkisian -- the parents of the girls -- arrived in the United States in 1991 with Emma and Mariam. They had three more daughters. They were divorced and Rouben gained his legal status after marrying a U.S. citizen. That marriage later broke apart.

Anoush never gained legal status, according to immigration officials.

In 1993, a deportation order was issued for the two girls.

During the 1990s each parent attempted to gain legal status for their two oldest daughters, but both attempts failed when the earlier order was discovered. An appeal dragged the process out, according to Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But Rouben has said in recent days that he thought otherwise and attempted to obtain proof of the girls' status in July, only to be told of the deportation order. It took until some time shortly before Jan. 14 for immigration authorities to obtain travel permits for the girls from the Armenian Consulate in Los Angeles, at which point the girls were detained.

But the family's lawyers won a stay against their departure and are seeking humanitarian consideration in allowing the girls to stay in the country while their father obtains citizenship.

For Kice, the case, though complex, has an obvious conclusion, since the girls "had their day in court ... and failed to obtain any (legal) benefit."

She said the sympathy these girls have apparently gained not only in Congress -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas, has also shown support, writing a letter to immigration authorities earlier this week -- but also in the public, is not the issue.

"I understand that there are people being deported every day that are good people. But this is not a popularity contest ... We are a nation of laws and we have to obey the laws," she said.

Immigration officials have argued against releasing the teens because, in light of the fact that their mother is an illegal immmigrant who has disappeared into the United States, the girls could do the same.

But Thronson said the case "should shine a light on a broken system."

He said there were more than 6,000 minors detained by immigration authorities last year, many of whom were deported.

"These are children being separated from their families -- families that are separated as a result of the system even though family unity is ostensibly its goal," he said.

"If it's true they've exhausted all their legal rights then we have to think -- should our system somehow be able to accommodate the facts of a case like this ... the fact of family?"

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