Arcane immigration rules could send Flower Mound families packing to Serbia
03:43 PM CDT on Thursday, June 17, 2010
FLOWER MOUND – Olivera "Oli" Snyder and her sister, Jelena Boldt, are suburban housewives, happily married women who impress me as the sort who would volunteer to make cupcakes for a church bake sale on short notice.
SONYA N. HEBERT/DMN
Sisters Jelena Boldt (left foreground) and Olivera 'Oli' Snyder are facing deportation to Serbia after living in the United States since they moved here as children in 1985. Their husbands (background) have said they will move their families to Serbia if the women are deported.Brought to this country when they were little girls, they have obediently followed the maddeningly slow and sometimes inexplicable requirements for seeking permanent resident status. They have lived happy if unexceptional lives, going to school, growing up, marrying U.S. citizens.
Oli married a Denton County jail detention officer in 1995 and has three kids. Jelena, married for a year, is a University of North Texas business grad, anxious to start her own family. They're nice women.
This week, they were ordered to pack a bag: They're scheduled for deportation within the month to Serbia, a place where they know nobody, don't speak the language and haven't set foot since they were little girls.
Maybe the reason these two sweet, law-abiding women have been kicked to the head of the illegal-immigrant list is scrawled in the margins of some government file. Or maybe it's just one of the abiding mysteries of an arbitrary, inefficient, chaotically overburdened bureaucracy.
"This is one of the most disturbing departures from rational thinking I have ever witnessed," said their Austin-based lawyer, G.W. Smith.
He's obviously shaken by the abrupt turn in what he foresaw as a routine immigrant-naturalization case: "They have no criminal history. They've done everything they were instructed to do. If they're sent to Serbia, they'll be strangers in a strange land."
Technically, there is no native country to which they can return. Their parents brought them here in 1985 from Yugoslavia, which was