Putting A Face On Deportation: Asylum appeal creates agony

[shugah]

PUTTING A FACE ON DEPORTATION: Asylum appeal creates agony
Albanian family torn apart while case is pending
January 11, 2006

By all accounts, Ferdinand and Marieta Liti were living the American dream as immigrants who fled hard-line communist Albania in 1990 and eventually settled in the United States.

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Marieta Liti was seized by immigration officials in September 2004 after she arrived at their Detroit offices for what she thought was a routine reporting to her assigned immigration officer.

Within hours, she was placed on a plane back to Albania, stripped of her personal belongings and was not allowed to call her daughters -- then 10 and 13 -- to say good-bye. When she arrived in Albania, Marieta Liti says, she was jailed and beaten.

Fifteen months later, through the help of immigration attorneys and a local circuit court judge who took up her cause, she is back in the United States -- at least for now. She is set to be back in immigration court Feb. 28, this time seeking asylum for humanitarian reasons. Her husband also plans to seek that status.

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The abrupt deportation shocked her attorneys, who say that while she was, indeed, deportable -- her visitor's visa, like her husband's, had expired -- it is the usual practice to allow immigrants to remain in the United States while their cases work their way through the courts. And it is unusual to break up a family, deporting one spouse but not the other.

"It was a surprise to us," said Russell Abrutyn, an attorney with Marshal Hyman and Associates of Troy, a leading immigration firm in metro Detroit that is representing the Litis.

"They had the discretion to leave her here while the appeal was pending, and they chose not to. We're not sure why."

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