Thread: NJ: Deported Peruvian illegal wants Congressional reprieve

Monica Yant Kinney: An American dream cut short
A 22-year-old Rutgers graduate is being deported to the country her family fled when she was 3.

By Monica Yant Kinney

Inquirer Columnist
Gisell Torres is a recent Rutgers grad with a finance degree, a stack of academic awards, and countless kudos for community service. She married her college sweetheart. He wants to be a doctor, she a lawyer.

Torres would seem to be writing her own American success story, except she was born in Peru and a happy ending rests in the hands of U.S bureaucrats she has never met.

Barring government intervention, the 22-year-old with a long face and tired eyes must report to immigration officials Tuesday with a one-way ticket to a country she has never seen, a place her father fled when terrorists threatened his life.

The Torres family arrived legally in the United States in 1990 when Gisell was 3. In 1999, the family was denied asylum and ordered to return to Peru in 2002.

But Gisell's parents didn't leave. And they didn't tell their children about that fateful decision to stay.

Now it is Gisell who may suffer for the risk her parents took to protect her. She has a Social Security card, yet resides in limbo.

"I never really thought about my status, whether I was a citizen," Torres told me last week in a sniffly interview. "I'm an American. That's all I've ever been."

A family's flight
In Peru, Gisell's father, Alberto, was a high-ranking official receiving death threats from Shining Path guerillas wanting to overthrow the government.

"In July 1988," he wrote in his asylum application, "the vehicle that I drove at work was dynamited and reduced to wreckage."

The family moved repeatedly, but the violence and threats continued. So the Torreses fled to Miami, later settling in Hackensack, N.J. Alberto worked as a manager at a Holiday Inn. His accountant wife, Olga, was a bank teller. Gisell and her younger sister, Milagros, excelled in school. In 1991, a brother, Albert, was born.

The six years it took the asylum case to be heard proved both a blessing and a blow.

Usually, Judge Eugene Pugliese said in his 1999 oral decision, people who have been "persecuted in the past . . . have a well-founded fear of future persecution."

But by then, the State Department determined, Shining Path had lost its grip on Peru and Torres had lost his luster as a target. "The chances of this individual . . . having any trouble at all with the terrorist groups," Pugliese theorized, "is so remote as to be almost nonexistent."

An appeal was denied. In June 2002, the family was told to leave the United States within 30 days.

A daughter's plight
Gisell was just 15, a National Honor Society member with her nose buried in books. She knew nothing of her parents' gamble, not that she could have done anything anyway.

Now she says she can't blame them: "I understand why they did it. They stayed for us."

Last spring, authorities sent her parents back to Peru, orphaning American-born Albert, just 17. Shortly after, 20-year-old Milagros was deported, though married to a U.S. Army soldier stationed in Iraq.

Gisell, on the dean's list at Rutgers, won a short reprieve.

"Immigration allowed her to complete her studies," said Torres' Bala Cynwyd attorney, John Vandenberg. "They definitely deserve praise and gratitude for that."

What he's asking for now is less of a stretch: Reopen Torres' case so she can apply for legal residence as the wife of a U.S. citizen, Yoniel Lopez (and then, ultimately, seek citizenship herself).

David Santos, a U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said he could not comment.

The couple also appealed to Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), born in the United States to Cuban immigrants.

Last week, Menendez sent a letter to immigration officials asking that they "review her case once again and pay particular attention to her request for a stay of removal." On Friday, the senator called a deportation official on Torres' behalf.

Vandenberg hopes it's not too late. In eight years of practicing immigration law, he said, he has never been affected by a case like Torres'.

"This is a kid who's done everything right," he said. "She followed the rules, made a difference in her community. She's a model citizen."

A model citizen, perhaps, but of what country?

Contact Monica Yant Kinney at myant@phillynews.com or 215-854-4670.





http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_up ... short.html

Sorry.. be mad at your family. There are Billions and Billion and Billions of People that would love to be in this country and would do anything humanly possible to get and stay here to Include, lie, cheat, steal and kill to make it to America... We are not the Worlds life raft that is bloated at the seams and ready to pop because of millions of others like this student

Bye~Bye... dont come back... Make your home country a better place

AND JUMP IN THE BACK OF THE LINE