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Friday November 3, 2006

Jewish lawyer, Palestinian client sue government, win green card battle

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Mohamed Aboushaban’s life was so riddled by Kafka-esque circuses of bureaucracy, the Palestinian-born Santa Rosa man probably worried about waking up metamorphosed into a giant cockroach.

That didn’t happen. But what did happen was the U.S. government took eight and a half years to process a green card application that should have been handled in a cursory manner.

Aboushaban, a Santa Rosa car salesman, only won his coveted card after successfully suing the government over the inaction; on Oct. 18 a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the government to “adjudicate the application forthwith,” and nine days later it was, indeed, adjudicated in his favor.

The ruling concluded a successful partnership between Aboushaban, a Palestinian born in Gaza, and lawyer Kip Steinberg of San Rafael, a Jewish man who attends Congregation Rodef Sholom.

“I will say I always learned at Hebrew school that the Torah’s greatest commandment was to help the stranger in your midst. I don’t look at my clients as being Palestinian or Indian or this or that. Each is a person, a human being. I’m a human being and we relate to each other. Labels just get in the way of these things,” said Steinberg.

Added Aboushaban, “I think he was very sympathetic with me and I thought he was close to me and it was more than just doing his job and money. It was more than that.”

The Palestinian’s troubles began in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, where Aboushaban had lived since the 1970s and ran a travel agency. Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority’s backing of Hussein created incredible problems for Palestinians living in Kuwait, and Aboushaban, his wife and three American-born children were put on a U.S. government-chartered jet and flown to the United States.

Aboushaban was told that his asylum case was straightforward and should be granted rapidly, yet his paperwork languished for more than six years before he was approved. After a year as an “asylee,” he applied for his green card in 1998.

That was eight and a half years ago.

“When I read through his file, I thought ‘Oh my God.’ I’ve seen cases delayed unreasonably for a year, maybe two,” said Steinberg.

“I began suspecting there was nothing going on with his case. There was no investigation, it was sitting on some bureaucrat’s shelf and it would stay there forever, long past the time my grandchildren and his grandchildren came into this earth, unless the government was sued.”

Steinberg suspects that Aboushaban’s Arabic name and origin slowed the process. And while he supports extensive background checks, he notes that dragging out the process aids no one.

“If, God forbid, there’s another 9/11-type incident in this country and it turns out someone whose background check was pending for years was the one responsible … The government is really dropping the ball on these cases,” he said.

Aboushaban’s legal limbo left him unable to travel outside of the United States throughout his 16 years here. When his mother died in 2001, he was unable to attend her funeral in Gaza.

“I feel like a human being, a person, a free man. I feel like, at last, I have my own life back together,” he said.

Added Steinberg, “He’s the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. And through all this, he still thinks the United States is the best country in the world.”

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