VACATION FROM HELL
By Moises Mendoza
Salon.com
Oct 2 2012
Mikhail Sebastian was looking for a beach getaway. Now he may be
stuck in American Samoa for the rest of his life
Mikhail Sebastian’s trip to American Samoa redefines the term
nightmare vacation.
Instead of a five-day holiday to the lush, tropical US territory in
the South Pacific, the 39-year-old has spent more than nine brutal
months there caught in an immigration law hell. Experts agree it’s
an unprecedented illustration of America’s broken immigration system.
The key sticking point: Though he’s lived legally in Houston and
the Los Angeles area for years under a special arrangement with the
Department of Homeland Security, Sebastian is stateless, with no
citizenship at all. The federal government argues that during his
vacation he “self-deported” from the United States – despite the fact
that American Samoa is a US territory.
Now the part-time travel agent and barista is stuck on the
76-square-mile island as federal and local officials hash out what
to do with him. Though the local government is putting him up with a
local family and giving him a $50 weekly allowance, Sebastian can’t
work under American Samoan laws and can’t travel off the island.
Most days, he can be found at the local McDonald’s using an internet
connection to post online appeals, while drawing the sympathy of
doting locals, who have been circulating petitions to get him back
home. He’s living a sweaty Pacific island version of “The Terminal,”
the movie in which Tom Hanks plays a traveler who loses his citizenship
and is stuck in an airport.
“It’s horrible here, it’s hot it’s making me sick, I can’t stand it
anymore,” Sebastian told GlobalPost over Skype recently. “I just want
to go home.”
Charity Tooze, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees’ (UNHCR) office in the United States, which is advocating
for Sebastian, said: “There’s a big gap in the legal structure of
the United States when it comes to stateless people, and Mikhail has
fallen right through it.”
Stateless in America
To understand Sebastian’s case, one has to grasp the problem of
statelessness in America.
At least 4,000 people in the United States don’t have citizenship
in any country, through no fault of their own, according to advocacy
group Refugees International.
In some cases, countries use nationality as a political tool, stripping
people of their citizenship when they’re abroad. Other times states
simply cease to exist, and no one will recognize their former citizens.
That’s what happened in Sebastian’s case, which is no simple matter.
He is an ethnic Armenian born in what is today Azerbaijan, but when
the Soviet Union broke up, Azerbaijan refused to issue him a passport
because, he claims, of his Armenian background.
But Sebastian adds that he has been unable to convince Armenian
authorities to grant him a passport either. The explanation, he says,
is that Armenia isn’t convinced of his ethnicity and won’t grant him
citizenship under its laws.
The US immigration system can offer stateless people a path to legal
residency and possible citizenship if an asylum claim is accepted.
But often, as in the case of Sebastian, stateless people end up in
a legal twilight zone of sorts. His asylum application was rejected
in 1996, the year after he came to the US on a business visa in his
USSR passport and decided he wanted to stay in the country.
After a judge ruled in 2002 that he should be deported, Sebastian
was jailed for six months. But since no country would accept him,
officials released Sebastian with a work permit and the stipulation
that he regularly check in with immigration authorities, records show.
“People like this find themselves in a very precarious position,
where there aren’t really any remedies for them at all,” said Maureen
Lynch, an expert on statelessness affiliated with the International
Observatory on Statelessness in the United Kingdom.
They can end up living in permanent quasi-legality – often until
their deaths, Lynch said.
More than 70 countries have signed on to two international conventions
that bind them to provide a way for the stateless to regularize their
legal status.
But the United States never has.
And though lawmakers have introduced legislation in the past to offer
a pathway to immigration regularization, it has failed each time.
Seeing the world
Because he can’t travel outside the United States, Sebastian says he’s
been visiting the most exotic American destinations he can find – Guam,
Puerto Rico and Hawaii, among others. To facilitate his travels, he has
a so-called “World Passport” from the World Service Authority, which
David Gallup, the group’s president, describes as a global-governmental
organization. A World Passport is a document that’s supposed to confer
world citizenship; it can be issued to anyone, other than criminals,
terrorists and citizens of certain countries, like Cuba and Iran,
Gallup says.
Last December, he decided, the South Pacific was next on his list. He
says he checked with US immigration authorities and was told that
visiting American Samoa wouldn’t cause him any problems. The American
Samoans sent him an authorization to travel with the World Passport –
because of American Samoa’s unusual relationship to the United States,
everyone traveling there and back passes through customs.
Here’s the chain of events no one disputes: After visiting American
Samoa, Sebastian took a side trip to the neighboring independent
country of Samoa before crossing back into the US territory. When
he tried to board a plane on the way back to the mainland, airline
officials called US immigration authorities. They decreed that a
World Passport wasn’t a valid travel document and he couldn’t board
the flight back.
That doesn’t make sense to American Samoan officials, who wonder how
Sebastian can be considered deported from the United States if he is
now on American territory.
In a written statement to GlobalPost the Department of Homeland
Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency wrote that
Sebastian had, in effect, self-deported himself: “In 2002, an
immigration judge with the Executive Office for Immigration Review
(EOIR) ordered Sebastian to depart the United States. At that
time, he was not in ICE custody as the agency had deferred action
on his removal. In the meantime, he had been granted employment
authorization. In December 2011 when Mr. Sebastian traveled to American
Samoa and Samoa, he was prohibited from returning to the United States
due to the immigration judge’s order.”
Stuck forever?
On the island, authorities have been appealing to the highest levels
of the federal government. The territory’s governor, congressional
delegate and the local Office of the Attorney General have all begged
the US to take Sebastian back.
And a thick web of pro-bono immigration attorneys and UNCHR have
taken up Sebastian’s case.
But Homeland Security won’t give in and Sebastian’s supporters worry
that he could be stuck forever. If that happens, American Samoa
would have to change its laws to allow Sebastian to work or own land,
officials say.
“As a US territory we can’t tell the US what to do. And we don’t have
the same influence a state does,” said Vincent Kruse, a lawyer with
American Samoa’s Attorney General who has been working on Sebastian’s
case. “It’s definitely very frustrating because we just want to help
Mikhail go home but we’re starting to think about the possibility
that he may be here for the long run.”
In August Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, American Samoa’s delegate to
the US House of Representatives, appealed directly to Secretary of
Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in a letter, calling the situation
“unprecedented.”
“There are no pre-existing cases that would provide a better
understanding in addressing his situation,” Faleomavaega wrote,
asking her to resolve the situation.
But in a Sept. 13 letter, the Department of Homeland Security rejected
that appeal, prompting strong words from Faleomavaega as he once more
demanded Napolitano’s personal intervention.
“It is clear to me that the US Department of Homeland security has
no sense of compassion for Mr. Sebastian,” he wrote Napolitano last
week, citing Sebastian’s “extreme” living conditions and calling his
treatment by federal authorities “inexcusable.”
Sebastian just wants to get back to California to reopen his asylum
case – records show federal officials had previously approved its
reopening but rescinded the offer after they realized he was stuck
in the South Pacific.
Back in McDonald’s, Sebastian says he isn’t reveling in his
mini-celebrity on the island of just 55,000 people. He’s feeling
powerless and at his lowest points has even contemplated suicide.
“This whole situation is like a hell for me,” he said.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/02/vacation_from_hell/