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Two sisters ponder meaning in 'family values'

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  • Two sisters ponder meaning in 'family values'

    Roanoke Times, VA
    Jan 30 2004

    Tommy Denton: Two sisters ponder meaning in 'family values'

    As of this writing, I'm not sure of the status of the jailing of Emma
    and Mariam Sarkisian.

    The sisters were under the impression they were from Las Vegas, Nev.,
    but federal officials disputed that they belong anywhere within the
    United States. Last week, after their Jan. 13 arrest in Las Vegas,
    they sat in an immigration detention cell in a center adjacent to the
    jail in Los Angeles County in California, at one point missing a
    court-ordered deportation flight by less than an hour before a
    federal judge granted an extension of their appeals.

    Emma, 18, is a 2004 graduate of Palo Verde High School in Las Vegas;
    Mariam, 17, is - or had been, depending on her legal status - a
    senior at PVHS.

    Officials with the Homeland Security Department have sought their
    deportation for violation of U.S. immigration laws. It would appear,
    according to the feds, that the girls are guilty of living in America
    after their father divorced his former wife, who was a U.S. citizen.

    At least U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., urged Homeland Security
    Secretary Tom Ridge on Thursday to look personally into the actions
    of his minions. But by then, much needless damage was already done.

    Emma and Mariam had accompanied their mother and father, Anoush and
    Rouben Sarkisian, when they slipped out of the Soviet Union on a
    tourist visa in 1991 and fled to America. Rouben remains a legal
    resident. So were the sisters, according to letters sent from the
    U.S. Justice Department in 1997 that showed acceptance of their
    applications for residency.

    For Rouben Sarkisian, who now runs Tropicana Pizza at the
    all-American intersection of Pecos Road and Wigwam Parkway in Las
    Vegas, the years since arriving in his new country have not exactly
    been filled with unceasing romanticism.

    Not long after the Sarkisians arrived, Anoush petitioned for
    political asylum just as the Soviet Union was dissolving. Her
    petition was denied, but she and Rouben had three more daughters in
    the next three years before their marriage broke up.

    A second marriage, to a U.S. citizen, provided Rouben legitimate
    residence status, but that marriage ended as well. For the next few
    years, Rouben lived with his five daughters and shared rearing them
    with Anoush.

    Last July, he took Emma and Mariam to immigration officials in Las
    Vegas to inquire about their status. His marriage to a U.S. citizen
    may have provided residency status for him, he was told, but that
    divorce erased the daughters' standing. They would have to go - to
    Armenia, a country that did not exist as a country in 1991, a "place"
    where the girls may have been born but where they knew no one and
    knew not one word of Armenian.

    But Armenia - now an independent nation, formerly a Soviet republic -
    refused to accept them, saying the girls had been born in a country
    that no longer exists, that is, the Soviet Union. So they took up
    virtual residence in Limbo.

    By Jan. 14, Armenia changed its mind and declared that the daughters
    would be issued passports after all. To the Homeland Security
    Department's apparent satisfaction, they were placed in custody and
    put on a plane to Los Angeles.

    Local Russian and Armenian supporters rallied to their cause, with
    Las Vegas attorney Jeremiah Wolf Stuchiner filing a federal habeas
    corpus petition, the stay granted by a U.S. magistrate, that at least
    kept the sisters in the L.A. detention center.

    A 26-year veteran of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
    before opening his private law practice, Stuchiner must have thought
    that his quarter-century of experience was irrelevant to this
    Kafkaesque scenario of an official insistence upon rending two
    sisters from the rest of their family.

    Stuchiner called the proceedings "madness," and noted that the
    bureaucratic rigidities arising from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
    attacks have taken a toll on reason and common sense in this
    particular case.

    "[The attacks] have caused the most compassionate nation in the
    world," Stuchiner told the Las Vegas Sun, "to not have compassion
    with a couple of teenage girls."

    Maybe things that never should have happened are eventually going to
    work out all right after all, 14 years after a young family sought
    refuge from the Soviet tyranny.

    Don't be surprised, though, if Emma and Marian Sarkisian read with a
    more jaundiced eye the words inscribed at the entrance to the
    pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor,
    your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" - in the land of family
    values.
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