Waiting Game for Widow

The autumn of 1996 was a bad time to have immigration problems.

Presidential candidates were suggesting that troops patrol the border. Congress was hashing out yet another bill targeting illegal immigration. And the Immigration and Naturalization Service was deporting illegals at a record rate.

Yet everyone who heard the story of Jasmin Salehi’s looming deportation seemed to say the same thing: “That’s not right.”

More than a year after the native of South Korea learned that she was on the verge of being forced to leave the country because she had not been married to her American husband long enough when he was slain by robbers, Salehi is still here.

Despite countless hours of work, however, and the support of everyone from prominent Washington politicians to the head of the INS, the Sherman Oaks woman’s case remains unresolved, hanging in a limbo that is part politics, part bureaucracy.

The soft-spoken 33-year-old with the easy, if somewhat sad, smile remains optimistic, though. The American brand of justice she learned of while growing up in Seoul prevailed this summer when her husband’s killers were sentenced to life in prison, she says. And she believes it will prevail in her immigration case.

She knows, though, better than most, that in her adopted country, real justice seldom comes with speed or ease. It takes letters to a congressman in Woodland Hills--and then his successor. It takes an appearance at the Federal Building in Westwood and visits to senators in Washington. And it takes the tireless help of a local family who lost a son to violence and is struggling to help themselves by helping her.

“People keep asking me why not yet, why so complicated,” Salehi said recently. “I say I don’t know.

“I could go back, sure,” she continued, speaking over the din of a nearby construction job and a Yorkshire terrier named Happy.

“But I was married here. I made a life here. I want to stay here.”

It was a brief marriage, lasting just 11 months before it was ended by a bullet. And the INS requires that a marriage last at least two years to qualify a noncitizen spouse for permanent residency. But it was, according to all who have worked on her case, a real love match.

Jasmin, whose given name is Mai Hoa Joo, met Cyrus Salehi in August 1993, in a downtown Denny’s restaurant. Cyrus was the manager, Jasmin a tourist, in town to visit her younger sister, who was attending a fashion design school.

The Iranian-born Cyrus had learned enough Korean during his two decades in Los Angeles to tell her, “You’re pretty.”

It was only a matter of time after that, of dinner dates and trips back and forth to Korea, of long phone calls and longer love letters, before the two were married in 1995. By that time, Cyrus was managing a Denny’s in Reseda, where he was also a part-owner.

Early on a Saturday morning, Feb. 3, 1996, a 20-year-old gang member named Ruben Lopez walked into the restaurant while a buddy and two girls waited in a getaway car. Lopez demanded money. Cyrus Salehi opened the till and handed him the contents: $400.

Lopez shot him anyway.

A few months later Jasmin Salehi met Ralph and Francine Myers, whose son, Tom, was shot to death after confronting gang members at a party in 1993. After they offered to help guide her through government bureaucracies, she went to the INS office in Los Angeles to discuss a conditional residency, which would likely in time become permanent.

It was then that Salehi was told that without an American husband, she would have to leave the country.

“I understand the INS regulations, but I could not accept that they wouldn’t make an exception” because of the murder, said Ralph Myers, the owner of a Granada Hills moving company, whose tireless efforts to secure Salehi’s residency are something of a substitute for grief counseling following the loss of his son.

“I couldn’t buy that--not in America.”

When The Times first reported Salehi’s plight in September 1996, the outcry--from California to Washington to Seoul--was such that Salehi and others believed a reprieve was imminent. But a solution has proved elusive despite the efforts of many.

“We’ve learned the system the hard way,” Myers said. “Jasmin could probably pass her citizenship test right now, at least the part on how the government works--or is supposed to work.”

“I know more names in the Senate and Congress in America than in Korea,” Salehi said. “Lots more.”

The first letters went to Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), but the veteran lawmaker was retiring. Brad Sherman would win the seat, but not until November.

The next pleas went to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who quickly sought an exception from the Los Angeles INS office. Despite her clout, INS officials told Feinstein they were sorry, but they simply had no authority to make such an exception.

Feinstein introduced a private relief bill in the Senate, saying “Jasmin Salehi has done everything right in order to become a permanent resident of this country . . . except for the tragedy of her husband’s murder 13 months before she could become a permanent resident.”

But the legislative session ended without the bill making it out of committee, killing it.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie Samuels, who prosecuted the man who shot Cyrus Salehi and the getaway driver, wrote the INS saying Jasmin Salehi might be needed to testify during the trials.

With a legal need for Salehi to remain in the country, the INS extended her so-called parole status through Sept. 30 of this year, but in no way guaranteed her residency beyond then. And as Samuels prepared the cases against Cyrus’ killers, Salehi, along with the Myers family, settled in for the long haul.

Working on his home computer, Ralph Myers designed elaborate newsletters and information packages, complete with photographs of the couple at their wedding and of Jasmin Salehi with Feinstein, and with various editorials calling on the INS to find a way to let her stay.

One has a full-color American flag on the front. Another is titled “Jasmin Salehi: America--Where I Belong.”

A realist with a hard-earned understanding of a sometimes-slow system, Myers labeled the newsletter “Volume 1, Issue 1.”

In February, the two appeared with Feinstein at a press conference on the steps of the Federal Building in Westwood in support of Feinstein’s proposed Victim’s Rights Amendment to the Constitution. A month later, Feinstein reintroduced Salehi’s private relief bill. In April--between attending the trial of the man who shot her husband and his sentencing to life in prison without parole--Salehi went to Washington, D.C., with Ralph Myers and Myers’ daughter, Maria. They met with aides to members of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, asking them to support both Feinstein’s amendment and Salehi’s private bill.

By early summer, the group had wooed Sherman, a Democrat who had won Beilenson’s seat the previous November, and Sherman introduced a companion bill to Feinstein’s private legislation, taking up Salehi’s fight in the House.

There was more business to attend to before the summer was out, however--another murder trial. This time, it was 19-year-old Samuel Martinez, the driver of the getaway car, sitting at the defense table in the Van Nuys courtroom. Jasmin again attended every day, from jury selection through his sentencing. He also got life in prison without parole.

She was often accompanied by a member of the Myers family.

“People asked me why I wanted to be there--it’s so painful,” Salehi recalled. “I said, because my husband’s dead, but I’m not dead yet.”

By the time the trial was over, her case was once again looking promising. Even though her INS extension was running out, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner personally assured Feinstein that as long as any private legislation was pending, Salehi would not be deported.

Then on Nov. 6, the Senate Judiciary Committee--headed by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, a proponent of stricter immigration laws who himself had a couple constituents with special immigration needs--passed the bill on a unanimous vote. The following day, the full Senate did the same.

The only remaining hurdle was the House bill. But the first session of the 105th Congress wrapped up before Sherman’s bill could be taken up. The bill is not dead; it still could be heard soon after the Congress reconvenes in January.

And Sherman has helped Salehi secure another extension from the INS, through September 1998.

But there are no guarantees.

Despite her appearances on television programs ranging from nightly news broadcasts in South Korea to “Hard Copy,” despite the hundreds of hours spent on her behalf by the Myers family and the staffs of Feinstein, Sherman and Beilenson, despite the urgings of radio station editorialists and victims’ rights advocates, the specter of deportation is still there.

“Jasmin’s is a unique case,” said Sherman. “A private bill is a very difficult thing to accomplish. I have a high degree of confidence, but not absolute certainty.”

And, he added, the American public all but demands it be difficult to pass such special bills.

“While there is no one I’ve met who says boot Jasmin out . . . they also don’t think it should be easy” to get an exception to immigration statutes, he said.

Salehi doesn’t believe it should be easy, either. She just figures that maybe she’s paid her dues.

Ralph Myers, who, when he’s not making copies of his Jasmin Salehi newsletters, speaks to young criminals about the heartache they cause, figures things about the same way.

“This isn’t about politics,” he said. “This is about having compassion for someone who has suffered a terrific loss.”