News
Noor, Batool and Hadeel Kesbeh


There's something sitcom-like about the five Kesbeh daughters, who now share a single bedroom in their boxy, scarcely furnished 2nd floor apartment. All of them are very pretty and very different, as if they'd each been cast as easily discernible types in a broadly drawn script.

Noor, the oldest, is the responsible, intellectually curious one, who devours books like Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," sent to her by an American friend named Abraham. She had wanted to study medicine, something she can't afford to do in Jordan. Now she works six days a week as an assistant production manager in a factory that makes gold jewelry. It's located in a dusty industrial park on the edge of Amman. The bus ride there takes over an hour each way. She earns 200 J.D. a month, the equivalent of $280.

Sondos, 19, is the glamorous one. She found a job in an upscale cosmetics store -- also paying 200 J.D. a month -- and a moneyed but jealous boyfriend who constantly calls the cellphone he gave her. According to Noor, Sondos tells people she lives in Abdoun, an area of large new stone houses fronted by elaborate topiary and streets full of BMWs.

Hadeel, 17, is tough -- though she's given to cute pink T-shirts and precisely applied makeup, the rage at her new situation seems to crackle right under her skin. Batool, 14, is sunnier, a straight-A student and former athlete who still has a 2001 certificate honoring her academic achievements that was signed by Texas's former governor, George W. Bush. Afnan, 11, is the baby, with a huge stuffed Tweety Bird on her bed. When her sisters tease her, she sticks out her tongue and says that someday she, the family's only American, will be going back.

The Kesbeh's youngest son, Muhannad, a shy, lanky 16-year-old, stays in the background, playing hour after hour of "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" on the family's old computer. The family treasures the computer, their firmest link to the West.

And Alaa? Well, before he went on the lam, before he went to jail, he was a computer science student. He wanted to be an American soldier, but was twice turned away from the Navy because of his immigration status.

"This boy is a great boy," Sharif says about his son as he walks out the apartment door on his way to the airport. "He doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. America should be proud of him and give him immediate residency and send him to the best college in America."

The kids' interrupted ambitions weigh heavily on Sharif because he knows it's all at least partly his fault. "They used to go to Starbucks, they used to go to Pizza Hut, they used to go to the mall," he says. "Now we have no income even to buy them any clothes. We don't know what to do. I don't know what to tell my kids."

His children try to ease his conscience, but in moments of frustration, Noor says, she blames him for everything. "Sometimes I take it out on him," she says. "I was a minor. I didn't know how to fix my status."

But before Sept. 11, Sharif says, immigration lawyers told him that the authorities weren't interested in prosecuting people like him and his family. "We felt very safe," he says. "We'd been told by many attorneys that as long as you don't do any kind of violation, no one will come and bother you."

Anyway, Sharif didn't think they had anywhere else to go, having been chased from his home by politics three times already.

He was born in a town near Ramallah in the West Bank, but his family was forced to flee during the 1948 war that attended the birth of Israel. His parents settled in the Qalandia refugee camp, and Sharif went to high school in Ramallah. On the day of his final exams in 1967, the Six-Day War began, and his family fled again. This time they settled in Baqaa, a refugee camp north of Amman, Jordan.

After studying agricultural engineering in Egypt, Sharif got a job in Jordan's Ministry of Planning, and in 1979, the government sent him to study at Texas Tech in Lubbock, where he earned an M.A. and fell in love with America.

Still, he returned to Jordan and worked at the ministry for another three years, meeting and marrying Asmaa, who had been studying Islamic literature at the University of Jordan.

In the 1980s, the promise of a fat paycheck lured them to Saudi Arabia. After working first for the American defense contractor Vinnell and then for the Saudi Prince Muqren, Sharif left to form his own company, a transportation firm that would deliver fertilizer from neighboring countries to Saudi farms. He imported 50 trailers from Houston.

Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, "and all my dreams go with the wind," Sharif says. With Saudi Arabia's borders closed, the trailers were left sitting on the ground in Riyadh, and his income froze. Saddam lobbed bombs at the city, destroying Noor's elementary school. Meanwhile, the Saudi government began discriminating against Palestinians, who were thought to be loyal to the Iraqi dictator.

Feeling that his life was becoming untenable, Sharif says he decided to visit America to "evaluate the situation." His brothers were already there, working in the flag trade.

On Aug. 16, 1992, the Kesbehs arrived in the United States on a six-month tourist visa. Deciding they wanted to stay, Sharif went to the immigration office in Houston and received a one-year work permit, which he renewed the next year, and the next. The Kesbeh kids enrolled in public school, where they became honor-roll students. Little by little, Sharif Kesbeh built up the flag business that his brothers had started, eventually taking it over when they moved to other parts of the country.

"We had excellent relations with the community, Arab, Muslim, Christians and Jews," Sharif says. When a local Holocaust museum wanted flags, the Kesbehs donated them.

Meanwhile, though, the family wasn't having any luck getting green cards, which they'd applied for based on their status as Palestinian refugees. They finally hit a wall in 1997, when an immigration judge, ruling that the family wouldn't suffer unduly if they returned to Jordan, denied their last appeal and refused to renew Sharif's work permit. On June 15, 1998, the district director for Immigration and Naturalization Services in Houston issued a warrant of deportation for Sharif, Asmaa and six of their seven children. Only Afnan, who was born in Texas, was spared.

By then, though, the Kesbehs had roots in Houston.

"After six or seven years working hard to stand on our feet, if we leave the U.S., our family life will be destroyed," says Sharif. "To leave your only source of income, to take the kids from an American school to an Arabic system school, means the destruction of the family."

So the family did what thousands of others do when given an order to leave the country: They ignored it. No one from immigration ever tried to enforce the deportation -- before Sept. 11, they rarely did. Sharif hoped that, after a few years, the government would declare an amnesty.

The kids were only intermittently conscious of being illegal. It surfaced in small ways -- like when Alaa tried to join the military after high school and the Navy recruiter, at first delighted at the prospect of a smart, upstanding, Arabic-speaking young man, had to turn him down. It meant that Noor, Alaa and Sondos were ineligible for scholarships and had to attend an affordable community college, though they planned to transfer to university after two years.

Mostly, though, the kids grew up as average Texas teenagers. Legal residency "was something we needed," says Sharif, "but it was not something we needed badly."

Then came Sept. 11, "with all the tragedy to America and the world," says Sharif. "We felt so sad when we saw this tragedy. We never realized that we, the Kesbeh family, will be a victim of this tragedy."

Still, he says, "the moment they announced this act was done by Muslims, every Muslim on American soil got scared."

Recent Stories