UPDATE: U.S. Won’t Deport 11-Year-Old
Someone has come to their senses in the department of homeland security - an eleven-year-old who was to be deported last week has been told she can stay here in the United States.
Ewelina Bledniak of Georgia has lived here since she was three-years-old, but when her parents (one a citizen, the other a legal resident in the process of applying for citizenship) applied for a green card for their daughter, they found out she was an illegal resident. You can read the whole story here, but the basic reason is a paperwork mix-up by their lawyer.
The 11-year-old was slated for departure on the 20th (she had to be out of the country by the 23rd), headed to her native Poland where she would have to work with the U.S. Embassy to return to her family’s home in Georgia. Then the media and the blogosphere - and Babble! - got involved.
Highlighting the absurdity of kicking the child of two legal residents out of the country, the pressure on the U.S. government worked. According to CNN, “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney last week asked the U.S. Immigration Court in Atlanta, Georgia, to reopen Ewelina’s case and terminate the deportation proceeding ICE had initiated.”
Rather than travel overseas and leave their daughter with her maternal grandmother so they could return to the states and continue to run dad Hubert’s tile business (a major concern for dad - who wondered how he was supposed to make things work in this economy while he was in Poland), the Bledniaks have officially canceled their trip. Their daughter has been told she CAN’T leave the country now, while immigrations works through the issues and secures her green card.
When I first heard the story, my biggest concern was why the government is so quick to ship and American problem overseas. Why would the U.S. Embassy in Poland be put in charge of a problem that’s American in nature?
That was secondary, of course, to the biggest question here: why children aren’t naturally afforded the citizenship of their parents. Hubert Bledniak is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Why, then, isn’t his minor child? As an American, if I give birth to my daughter in Germany or Japan, she’s still an American citizen - so why not the children of our immigrants?
This is a step in the right direction, but it shouldn’t take yelling and screaming on the media’s part to make this common sense move.
Image: CNN
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Tags: citizenship, immigrants, immigration, Jeanne Sager, Poland, politics, terrorism
3 Comments
gregor commented on Jun 29 09 at 1:02 pm“why children aren’t naturally afforded the citizenship of their parents. Hubert Bledniak is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Why, then, isn’t his minor child?”
She would be a US Citizen if she had maintained legal presence in the US. But it appears the paperwork SNAFU meant she had been living here illegally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Citizenship_Act_of_2000
The Dept of Homeland Security loves it’s paperwork!
PlumbLucky commented on Jun 29 09 at 2:39 pmAs gregor said - they are, when the paperwork is filed properly!
mumus commented on Jun 29 09 at 5:31 pmAnd it’s not a given that children of American citizens born abroad get American citizenship. I discovered this when applying for my foreign born daughter’s passport. It wasn’t enough to simply be a U.S. citizen. I had to prove that I had actually lived five years in the U.S. Easier said than done!
