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Edited on Fri Jun-25-04 05:35 PM by AirAmFan
--and the publicity this blonde Palm Beach high school girl is getting makes it unlikely she ever will be deported. She's on crutches, for goodness sake, and her parents can afford a publicity-savvy Miami lawyer. Did you read scarletlib's excellent Palm Beach Post link above? All the good news is in there, though somewhat buried.
Now, were her family from Haiti and Riviera Beach, however, rather than from Scandinavia and Palm Beach, clearly our Bush Doctrine immigration laws very likely quietly would be applied for maximum turmoil and human tragedy.
Here are a few paragraphs from the PBP article linked above:
'U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., will seek a legislative correction to the law, but that will take time. "We've advised the family and had conversations with other legislators that clearly there's a problem with the law," said Paul Anderson, Graham's spokesman. Helene's father, John Jensen, is a vice president of operations for Teeters Agency and Stevedoring at the Port of Palm Beach. He and his family have been in the United States since 1997 under a work visa. That expired in March. An older American-born daughter is sponsoring John and his wife, Winnie, in their application to become permanent residents. They should get their green cards in a few months. In five years, they obtain citizenship. But Helene is neither a spouse, parent or child of her sponsoring sister and would fall into a different category with a probable 6- to 7-year wait to become legal. She obtained a three-month visa waiver that expired Thursday.
Immigration officials said the Jensens have not officially sought to keep their daughter here. "If the family had filed anything on behalf of Helene Jensen with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, we would have been able to consider the matter. However, nothing was filed with our department," said Ana Santiago, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Jensens' lawyer said they had considered the options, and the most likely to succeed required her to leave the country.
The Jensens will apply for a student visa when Helene arrives in Denmark. Then she could finish high school and attend college in the United States, long enough for her parents to become citizens and sponsor her. If that fails, the Jensens will seek "humanitarian parole," available only after other options have been exhausted. Helene's painful disease forced her to use crutches until she enrolled in a trial program for a new drug being tested by Abbott Laboratories. The parole would allow her to continue in the drug trial, only available in the States. But the visa could expire when the drug trial ends.'
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