BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/11/2007

Illegal immigrant trapped between two worlds

Wife fears: 'I have lost him'

By John Dignam TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WEBSTER- On weekly rides home from visiting his father, 4-year-old Matvey Zhuk asks his mother to turn off "the tear music," the classical music playing on the radio, then asks her to turn it back on.

With or without music, the Zhuk family is in tears.

Matvey's father, Yury M. Zhuk, is an illegal alien who has been held since February at the South Bay Correctional Facility in Boston by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A 45-year-old engineer who fled political oppression in his native Belarus in 2000, Mr. Zhuk recently was granted a "voluntary departure" under which he must leave the United States, but can later apply to return.

But Tatyana Zhuk says she fears that if her husband goes back to Belarus, "I have lost him."

A report supporting Mr. Zhuk's application for asylum by a Harvard University expert on Eastern Europe stated: "Were Mr. Zhuk to return to Belarus today, he would face a palpably more hostile and unpredictable environment than he would have faced several years ago. His fear of persecution and danger to his person and well-being is better grounded than ever."

Yury and Tatyana Zhuk live in a third-floor walkup at 44 Lake St. with Matvey and Katya, Mrs. Zhuk's 15-year-old daughter. Mrs. Zhuk, also a native of Belarus, became a U.S. citizen in 2006. She said the couple over the past five years here worked steadily, took English language classes, paid their bills, filed tax returns and paid taxes.

But for a number of reasons, Mr. Zhuk did not seek asylum and has lived as an illegal alien in the United States since 2001.

Mrs. Zhuk, 37, a middle school teacher in Belarus, works in the laser department of a local high technology company. She came to the United States in 1999 when she won the U.S. government's green card lottery, which issues 55,000 visas at random each year that give the recipient a chance to apply for permanent resident status.

She came without family, her daughter joining her later. She came, she said, "for more freedom of life."

Mr. Zhuk, a graduate of Grodno University who majored in radio physics, left Belarus in 2000 after his work with the Belarusian Popular Front led to arrests and beatings that caused him to fear for his life.

He went to Canada in 2001, and came to the United States a year later. He met Tatyana Sidorchuk in Trenton, N.J., the next year. In 2003, they moved here, and he worked jobs in construction and siding.

But Mrs. Zhuk said her husband's illegal status caused him great stress and has taken a toll on the family.

"Sometimes, speaking broken English is enough for someone to ask for your papers," she said. "He was feeling like a shadow in life."

Mr. Zhuk's status was discovered when a family argument last February attracted the attention of police. ICE took him into custody.

Lawyer Claudia Gregoire of Glickman Turley, a Boston law firm which has represented Mr. Zhuk since February, said his detention at South Bay was not a criminal sentence and that he had no criminal convictions.

"Some people are detained when there are deportation charges against them," she said. "It's at the discretion of the immigration judge."

Ms. Gregoire said applications for asylum and to "withhold a removal" (deportation), were filed on Mr. Zhuk's behalf, but were withdrawn late last month before a scheduled hearing.

Had either application been denied, she said, Mr. Zhuk would have been deported with no chance to return. And there was a very good chance they would have been denied.

Those seeking asylum, with some exceptions, must do so within one year of entering the country, which Mr. Zhuk did not do. And even if Mr. Zhuk's application to "withhold" his removal was approved, it would have left him without legal status and no chance to gain permanent resident status, according to Ms. Gregoire.

"If was a difficult decision for the family," Ms. Gregoire said. "There's certainly a great amount of anxiety. I'm sure that this has taken its toll."

However, she said, voluntary departure is not an unusual action because it allows a person to seek legal entry into the Unites States.

From 1997 through 2006, 284,486 people were granted asylum in the United States, either by the application process or by a judge, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Of that number, 1,173 have been from Belarus, 207 of them last year.

As of January 2006, there were an estimated 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, 6.6 million of them from Mexico, according to DHS. About 4.2 million had entered the country in 2000 or later.

DHS reports that ICE removed more than 186,600 illegal aliens in fiscal 2006, 10 percent more than the year before.

Mrs. Zhuk said her husband had made some bad choices based on bad advice. A lawyer in Canada had suggested he put false information on his application for asylum there. Mr. Zhuk followed the advice, but then did not proceed because the information was not true, she said.

She said an immigration lawyer in the United States told him it was difficult to get asylum and advised him to wait for immigration reform.

"Some lawyers say stay quiet. We didn't know what to do. We decided to stay quiet, wait for change in immigration law. It's not changed yet," Mrs. Zhuk said.

Anna Kundron, who owns and lives in the apartment house at 44 Lake St., says she came here 42 years ago from Poland at age 17 because she wanted "a better future. You feel you are more free here."

She has known many European immigrants who have come to the United States, some of whom have lived in her apartments.

"They work hard," she said. "They want to get something more."

She praised the Zhuks and said they spend holidays such as Christmas and Easter with her and her husband, Edward.

"The family is always together. Yury is always with his wife and kids. He is quiet, very friendly, can do anything. He helped me repair one of my apartments. I hope he can come back and live here."

The Zhuks are members of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Epiphany in Roslindale. The family continues to attend Sunday services, although now Mrs. Zhuk and her children go to South Bay Correctional Institute after service each week to visit Mr. Zhuk.

Mrs. Zhuk is worried about his return to Belarus. She said she went to Belarus in 2005 and was under surveillance. She said she received telephone calls asking about her husband and threatening her and that a friend who is a police officer told her police could not protect her.

In his report supporting asylum for Mr. Zhuk, Timothy J. Colton of Harvard University, a political scientist, said Belarus is one of the "most authoritarian states" in Eastern Europe and is patterned on the former Soviet-style dictatorship.

In a speech in Latvia a year ago, he said, President Bush described Belarus as "a place where peaceful protesters are beaten and opposition leaders are 'disappeared' by the agents of a cruel regime."

Mr. Colton, director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, said Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko "has been increasingly ruthless in dealing with real and imagined dissent."

He said Mr. Zhuk's hometown of Grodno was a "one of the hotbeds of anti-Lukashenko dissent" and a stronghold for the BPF. Mr. Zhuk's active participation in that organization would make him known to the Belarusian KGB, or state security committee, according to Mr. Colton.

Mr. Zhuk, who in his application for asylum said he had been fired from an engineering job for his BPF involvement, would not be able to get a job or loan or buy a car if he returns, according to Mr. Colton. Nor would he be able to leave Grodno without police permission.

"I was against Lukashenko regime, too," Mrs. Zhuk said, and that was the reason she entered the green card lottery.

Ms. Gregoire says there is reason for optimism. Because Mr. Zhuk is leaving the United States voluntarily and is married to a United States citizen, chances are good he could return on a "relative visa" and then apply for permanent resident status, she said.

Tatyana Zhuk said her husband is "trying to see the bright side," but that she only sees the Dec. 10 deadline for him to leave the country and uncertainty beyond that.

"We make a plan to stay here, get (residency) papers, go to work, buy a home. Now everything is broken," Mrs. Zhuk said. "Now I'm going to buy a ticket for him to Belarus."

Source:

http://www.telegram.com/article/20071118/NEWS/711180498/1116

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