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| Thompson: The GOP '08 hopeful showed more openness to immigrants as a senator than he has as a candidate. Mary Ann Chastain/AP |
Thompson helped immigrants in legal peril
He intervened twice as a US senator for noncitizens at risk of deportation, records show.
from the December 10, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
The family stayed in the United States by renewing six-month visas. "Because they do not meet the requirements for permanent residence under current immigration law … the Salinas family will be forced to leave the United States following the expiration of their tourist visas," Thompson said in a September 1999 letter asking Sen. Spencer Abraham, then chairman of the immigration subcommittee, to consider his private bill. "It is my hope that we can act soon to prevent another tragic setback for the Salinas family."
The Korean family, Seung and Eun Kyung Lee, came to the United States with their son in 1988 on business and tourist visas, Mr. Lee said in an interview. When the visas expired around 1994, they became "out of status," or illegal, according to Mr. Lee and a September 1999 memo to Thompson from an aide.
In 1994, the family paid a $1,000 penalty that allowed Ms. Lee's father, a US citizen, to sponsor a petition to "adjust" them to legal status. But in May 1999, with the petition still pending, the father died, which would normally trigger an automatic revocation.
A few months later, Thompson wrote to a senior INS official, asking that the petition be reinstated under a humanitarian exception. "To deport this family and send them back to South Korea now because of INS processing delays … would pose an undue hardship on the Lees and their children," he wrote, describing the family as "model citizens in the Nashville community."
The next month, the INS made the exception. A spokeswoman for US Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency couldn't comment on specific cases because of privacy laws.
The Lees regained legal status in 2000 when their green-card application was approved, Mr. Lee said. "Mr. Thompson stood for my family," he said in a phone interview last week. "We were very, very happy."
Lee and his wife became citizens this year, he said. He owns a home-building firm, and the family lives in a four-bedroom house in the Nashville suburbs. His son graduated this year from Indiana University.
Both cases were causes célèbres in Thompson's home state of Tennessee. The Lees ran a popular market on Nashville's Music Row and enlisted the support of local music-industry figures.
The Salinas family was profiled in People magazine and championed by Marlo Thomas, the actress whose father, Danny Thomas, founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where Salinas's daughter received pro bono treatment in Memphis.
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