A family’s reprieve from fear

By Timothy Pratt

Saturday, April 4, 2009 | 2 a.m.

When Emma Sarkisian heard her mother’s voice tight with panic in a call from the North Las Vegas jail last week, she flashed back to her own calls from a different jail four years ago.

She too was told to pack her bags, along with her younger sister, Mariam, apparently to board a plane for Armenia, a country that didn’t even exist when Emma was born in 1986. She also called her family in fear. In the end, both sisters were saved from deportation by a highly unusual, last-minute phone call from Sen. Harry Reid to the secretary of Homeland Security.

But Emma hadn’t heard of any such drama this time; her mother, Anoush, was on the other end of the line saying she was being taken somewhere. Could it be a waiting plane?

Within a couple of hours, the two were wetting each other’s cheeks with tears of relief, locked in embrace on the sidewalk in front of the Las Vegas Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

After the mother of five had spent nearly two months in jail, including being chained to a hospital bed for four days, the federal government set her free March 26 under an “order of supervision,” according to her attorney, Arsen V. Baziyants.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman would not comment on the case, other than to say that Anoush, like Emma and Mariam, must report for regularly scheduled visits to Las Vegas immigration officials — and that the agency would continue to seek to deport the woman, who lacks travel documents.

The events again draw the Sarkisian family into the news, offering an example of the situation facing an estimated 2 million families in the United States.

Some members of those families were born here — as were three of the Sarkisian sisters, Patricia, 15; Elizabeth, 16; and Michelle, 17. Others become citizens over time, as did Rouben Sarkisian, the father of the girls, divorced from Anoush since 1999 but still in contact with his daughters. Some remain in limbo, such as Emma, now 22, and her sister Mariam, 21, who wait while Rouben’s application for their citizenship winds its way through the system. Still others find no legal recourse; the only thing keeping them from being deported is that the federal government can’t find them.

With an increased emphasis on enforcement, both at workplaces and in neighborhoods, more of those people, like Anoush Sarkisian, are being found and deported. As a result, more families are split apart.

Those who advocate fixing the immigration system by offering pathways to legalization for millions, along with increased border security, are increasingly pointing to the effect of deportations on millions of U.S.-born children. They say communities across the United States are better served by keeping families together.

Federal officials got to the Sarkisian family this time after discovering that Anoush was giving a deposition in an auto accident lawsuit. On Feb. 2, outside a law office, several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ordered Sarkisian out of her car and into handcuffs, in front of Emma, who looked on, stunned.

Emma and Mariam had been detained in a similar fashion four years earlier, teenage workers in their father’s suburban strip mall pizzeria suddenly catapulted into the glare of national media attention.

Their story began years earlier, however. Rouben Sarkisian 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. Anoush sought political asylum from the U.S. government, a case that took nearly six years, finishing with her losing an appeal. The government ordered her deported in 1999. She stayed, unwilling to leave her daughters.

Rouben shared the job of raising them. He thought the girls were due to become citizens, but ICE agents arrested them in January 2005 and sent them to a cell in Los Angeles.

After several weeks of dramatic back-and-forth, Reid’s call to the homeland security chief saved them. The federal government exercised its discretion to offer what’s known as humanitarian relief. Rouben has finally become a U.S. citizen and petitioned for his older daughters to do the same. But that will take years, and until then, the daughters can’t petition for their mother. Neither can Rouben, because they are divorced.

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.

Baziyants, Anoush’s attorney, is hoping to obtain legal status for her under an immigration law meant in part for people from former Soviet republics. He says attorneys incorrectly advised her more than a decade ago that she wasn’t eligible for help under this law.

For now, he says, the government made the correct decision releasing Anoush from jail, where she received inadequate medical attention for her diabetes, migraines and stomach disorders. A week before she was released, detention center officials took her to North Vista Hospital, where she remained chained to a bed for four days, refusing to sign papers consenting to an operation on her heart, he says. During that time, neither he or the family could obtain information regarding her whereabouts. Sarkisian’s stay also included repeated attempts, some at 3 a.m., to make her sign papers giving the Armenian government permission to grant her travel documents, the attorney says.

Baziyants adds that the Senate majority leader’s office also helped obtain Anoush’s release. A spokesman for Reid wouldn’t comment on the case, however.

People following the story of the Sarkisians have said the federal government should deport Anoush just as all orders of deportation should be acted on.

But Baziyants says the case is not cut and dry, and neither are many others. “The point isn’t whether we should open the floodgates and let everyone into the country,” he said. “The point is, are the rules as they are now really balanced? Do they reflect who we are as a country? Do we tear apart all these families, or take a closer look?”

Meanwhile, last Friday night at the Sarkisian house in Las Vegas, everyone ate kashlama for the first time in nearly two months; Anoush is the only one in the family who can prepare the Armenian meat-and-potatoes dish.

Michelle, a senior at Palo Verde High, was relieved. While her mother was gone, she didn’t sleep well and let her grades slip to C’s.

“There was so much stress,” she says. “The house was a depressing place. Now I can rest.”