Legal News

What Will Become of Obama?s ?Auntie Zeituni??

By Ashby Jones

She is described as tall, frail-looking, kindly and nice. She’s also President Obama’s aunt and a Kenyan immigrant living in the U.S. illegally.

But time might be running out for Zeituni Onyango, who recently returned from Cleveland to live in a Boston public housing project to prepare for a deportation hearing on April 1. Click here for the Boston Globe story.

According to the story, Onyango had fled Boston to stay with relatives in Cleveland last fall but returned to Boston a few weeks ago to fight removal from the United States. She has been living in the country illegally since she was ordered deported in 2004. She came to the United States in 2000 from Kenya to find work and to seek a better life.

So what will become of her? Critics, reportedly angry that she is living in taxpayer-funded public housing, are wondering whether political favoritism exists. Others say she may have legitimate grounds to stay in the United States.

Regardless, many are viewing the case as both a potential liability and opportunity for President Obama, though he has said that he has not had any involvement in the case and doesn’t plan to intervene. “If they follow through on a decision that she should go home, that would actually raise the president’s credibility enormously on immigration enforcement,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, told the Globe.

A spokesman for Onyango’s lawyer, Margaret Wong of Ohio, said in January that Onyango would present new evidence to back an asylum claim. Onyango has lost several attempts to fight deportation, and an immigration judge ordered her deported in October 2004. Generally speaking, asylum seekers must show that they fear persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group.

Onyango is a half-sister of the president’s late father, Barack Obama Sr., who was absent most of Obama’s life and who died in a car accident in 1982. The president met his aunt during a trip to Kenya in 1988 and included her in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” but has said he was unaware of her immigration issues.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 24, 2009 (boomark / email).