No More Delays in Family’s Reunion

Tialhei Zathang kept his arms crossed in front of his chest, the only outward sign that the former math teacher was nervous. He had not seen his wife, his two sons or his daughter for nearly six years -- not since he left them in hiding in India, after fleeing persecution in Myanmar, while he sought asylum in the United States.

And now they were finally here.

Their plane arrived Thursday evening, 44 minutes late. Two hours later, most of the people awaiting the flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport had come and gone. Their friends or relatives had emerged from behind the silver wall where Zathang knew his family must still be, dealing once again with U.S. immigration authorities.

Zathang, 45, had his own experiences with those authorities -- part of a tortuous journey to freedom that began Dec. 4, 1998, with his application for political asylum. The long delays he encountered and the arbitrary decision making along the way were detailed in The Times in 2001 as a window into the problems plaguing U.S. immigration courts. He eventually won asylum in 2002, which let him begin the paperwork that would allow his family to join him.

But it took an additional 990 days for the reunion to occur.

He was sure his children would remember him, even though the two youngest were 5 and 6 when he saw them last. He had tried to speak with them by phone every week. Sometimes they had been able to talk for as long as five minutes.

The last call was Wednesday, just before they boarded a Kuwait Airways jet -- their first time on a plane -- for the trip from New Delhi to Kuwait to London to New York.

While he waited, Zathang popped cough drops into his mouth to keep his breath fresh, and leaned over the metal rail that separated the waiting area from the arriving passengers.

The hall filled with Polish speakers awaiting a flight from Warsaw. And suddenly, among them, Zathang spotted his elder son, Tialceu, 20. And his wife, Hlawntial, more beautiful than in his few cherished family photos. And Tlunaguk, 11, and Rinsang, who celebrated her 10th birthday Sept. 20.

In seconds, Zathang was over the metal rail. He would not kiss his wife -- not in public, as his society frowned on such displays. But he swiftly embraced his children, who could not keep their hands off him. He put an arm around his wife, briefly.

Zathang said his heart was pounding so hard it hurt. He put his hand on his daughter’s chest and felt her heart fluttering wildly too. Their smiles were enormous. None of them had slept in days.

Meanwhile, his wife tightly hugged Jessica Attie, who had come to the airport to be with Zathang. Attie had helped make this day possible. She had handled Zathang’s case all these years -- first as a Georgetown University law student representing him in immigration court, later as a lawyer with White & Case, a large firm that allowed her to work on the matter at no charge.

“I am sure God has sent you to us,” Hlawntial Zathang told Attie.

It has been an excruciating trip through America’s immigration system for Zathang and his family, one marked by bureaucratic errors, questionable decisions and difficult hurdles. The final obstacle was a request by immigration authorities this year that they undergo costly DNA tests to prove they were related.

Attie, 30, handled the logistics, getting up at 3 a.m. to make countless calls to India. She smoothed out complications that developed when Zathang’s forms were rejected because they were photocopies, not originals. On that day alone, she said, she called India 15 times.

“It was my first case ever. There was something about it that resonated with me,” said Attie, who recently left White & Case for a job with Brooklyn Legal Services, where she will work with the poor. “I was so angry about how he was treated. It’s embarrassing.”

Zathang and his family fled Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation once known as Burma, in February 1998. He was an activist for democracy and a practicing Christian -- both unpopular positions in his country, a military dictatorship with a majority Buddhist population.

He had been arrested, detained and beaten once before. After being alerted that he was about to be arrested again, Zathang and his family made their way to India. There, they went into hiding after learning that Indian officials were deporting illegal immigrants back to Myanmar.

Zathang decided to seek refuge in the United States, and purchased an Indian passport on the black market.

Once in the U.S., he applied for political asylum. His case was assigned to an immigration judge, Joan V. Churchill, who rarely approved such requests. The government argued that because Zathang had traveled on an Indian passport, he must be a citizen of India, not Myanmar, and was committing fraud by claiming he was Burmese.

Unlike many applicants, though, Zathang had evidence and witnesses to support his claims.

A University of Illinois linguistics professor testified that he had known Zathang in Myanmar and that Zathang spoke a dialect found only in one part of that country. One of Zathang’s cousins, who had earlier been granted asylum, described how he too had purchased an Indian passport. An exiled member of the Burmese parliament told Churchill he had known Zathang for 20 years. And an article in an Indian newspaper, published in July 1998, described Zathang’s flight from his village and said that the police in Myanmar were “seeking him for interrogation.”

Churchill denied Zathang’s application and ordered that he be returned to India.

Partly because of publicity about the case, immigration officials eventually conceded that he was from Myanmar, and the appeals board overturned Churchill’s ruling. That allowed Zathang to petition immigration officials to allow his family to join him.

The government said it would take a little more than six months to process the documents. A year went by before the application was approved Oct. 24, 2003.

But that didn’t mean they could leave immediately.

To get the necessary visas for travel to the United States, Zathang’s wife and children had to be interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

At the end of the interview, the officer in charge gave Hlawntial Zathang a letter. “Our office has considered your case, but we still have some doubts regarding your application,” it said. “To resolve these issues you may go for DNA test. This will expedite the decision on your case. This test is completely voluntary. All costs associated with the test are your responsibility.”

To cover the $2,100 cost, White & Case donated $1,940. Zathang contributed $160, all he could afford.

The tests proved that, as Zathang put it Thursday, “all my kids are my real blood.”

Officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said the DNA tests, which technically are voluntary, were necessary in certain cases to root out fraud. Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the agency, said the government had no statistics on how often the tests were requested, but noted that they were becoming a useful tool to detect instances of “families growing suddenly.”

Immigration lawyers said the requests for DNA testing, the cost of which is prohibitive for many immigrants, increased after the Sept. 11 attacks. They said certain U.S. embassies -- particularly those in Africa, where document fraud was more common -- were more likely to order the tests.

“A lot of people are getting caught up in this,” said Erin Corcoran, a lawyer with the asylum program of Human Rights First, a New York-based advocacy group. “There’s a paralysis that adjudicators and decision makers have. They don’t want to be culpable of letting the wrong person into this country.”

For Attie, whose father was killed by a drunken driver when she was a teenager, the idea of losing six years of a father’s presence was overwhelming. “You see that family and you think the U.S. government did everything in its power to keep them out,” she said.

But now, at last, they have arrived. And Thursday, as Zathang loaded his family’s belongings into a van he and his cousin rented to make the drive from Baltimore to pick them up, his children walked over to the young lawyer to speak the few words of English they had learned.

“Thank you,” Rinsang said.

“Thank you,” Tlunaguk said.

“Thank you,” Tialceu said.