Youths’ Visas in Doubt After Mother’s Death

Three El Salvadoran teenagers who were granted U.S. government permission to move to Los Angeles with their mother earlier this year now face deportation because their mother’s death has left them without a legal right to be in the United States.

Ana Ruth Lozano, a single mother who worked in a garment factory in El Salvador, had long dreamed that she and her children would be able to join relatives in Los Angeles, a glittering place with promise beyond the postwar tumult of Central America.

She died in El Salvador in February at the age of 33, apparently of complications from typhoid fever, three weeks after her family received visas to emigrate to the United States following an eight-year wait.

Ironically, relatives say, Lozano took ill on the day she was informed by officials in the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador that authorities were approving the family’s long-delayed application.

“My mother always said we’d go to the United States and have a real chance to succeed,” said Sergio Lozano, 17, who finally arrived here last month with his siblings, Fauricio, 15, and Ana, 14.

With the shock of her unexpected death still raw, the family is facing another blow: The Immigration and Naturalization Service says that Lozano’s death means that her children must go back to El Salvador. Because she was the primary visa beneficiary, the INS says, the law calls for the papers of her children--the “derivative beneficiaries”--to be revoked upon her death.

The incredulous Lozano family has fallen into one of the many cracks in U.S. immigration law. Their case stands out even amid the often dramatic consequences in a legal arena replete with tales of separated families.

“It’s just not fair to send these children back now,” Zoila Esperanza Lozano, 54, the children’s maternal grandmother, said as she fought back tears during an interview at her Los Angeles apartment, where a photograph of her late daughter and a Mother’s Day poem from her are displayed prominently.

Rosemary Melville, INS deputy district director in Los Angeles, declined to discuss the Lozano case specifically, citing privacy laws. But she confirmed that visas for family members are considered “null and void” if the principal beneficiary dies before the visa is used. In “compelling” cases, Melville added, the agency has discretion to grant residency or block deportation based on humanitarian concerns.

In another era, legal observers say, authorities may have been inclined to stretch the letter of the law or issue a waiver allowing the Lozano children to stay. But such exceptions are more problematic amid today’s national climate generally hostile to immigration.

“The unfortunate track record of immigration law is if you make one exception you find it spinning out of control,” said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that seeks to reduce immigration levels and assails “loopholes” in the law.

Relatives of the Lozano children say they were assured by officials at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador that the children’s visas were still good, despite the mother’s death. They learned otherwise upon the youths’ arrival at Los Angeles International Airport last month, when, according to the family, the three youngsters were held and questioned for six hours and faced being sent back to El Salvador on the spot--an expedited “removal” procedure that has been in the INS arsenal since April 1, when a tough new immigration law went into effect.

Finally, inspectors agreed to allow the three into the country conditionally, pending the outcome of an agency review. The three teenagers have another date with the INS in Los Angeles on June 25.

The Lozano family has mobilized to do whatever necessary to keep the children in Los Angeles. The three, now enrolled at Belmont High School, are staying in their grandmother’s one-bedroom Westlake apartment.

“For me, the children are a blessing from my beautiful daughter, and I’ll do whatever I can for them,” their grandmother said.

Though of modest means, relatives here say they are willing to sign legally binding accords to care for the three and ensure that they do not become public charges.

Francisco Lozano, Ana Ruth’s younger brother, is spearheading a letter-writing campaign to officials in Congress and elsewhere. “If I have to go and see President Clinton, I will,” said Lozano, a hotel pastry chef.

In El Salvador, the family says, the three children have nothing to go back to: no home, no close kin, no means of support. Ana Ruth Lozano had been estranged from the children’s father for years, relatives say. Most close relatives on their mother’s side of the family are in the United States and Canada, as are many other Salvadorans, who left their homeland during the civil war that engulfed it in the 1980s.

The children’s grandmother has supported them in El Salvador for years, sending back monthly checks of up to $300, almost half her pay as a live-in housekeeper.

Seated in their grandmother’s home on a recent afternoon, all three Lozano youths spoke of their desire to remain in the United States, study, and embark upon careers: Sergio wants to be a graphic artist, Fauricio would like to be an airline pilot, and Ana hopes to become a lawyer.

“I don’t think I’d have any chance to even dream about such a thing back home,” said Fauricio.

“Here one has the chance to better oneself,” said the slender, reserved Ana. “This place is what our mother always wanted for us.”