Ian Button, law-breaker, is in charge of opening the blinds at his sister’s Suwanee home every morning. Afternoons, he’s happy to watch TV — “Pokemon” and “Knight Rider” reruns are favorites. Nights, he smiles at his 1-year-old niece, Ella, before the child goes to bed.
He’s hardly a public enemy; you won’t see him on “America’s Most Wanted.” But he is a criminal, technically speaking. Button, 38, is an illegal immigrant living in Gwinnett County.
That hardly makes him unique, according to federal and state statistics. But Button is different: A British citizen, he is mentally disabled, with the intellectual capacity of a 7-year-old. His sister, Lisa Coursey, is his legal guardian.
Three years ago, she brought him to live with her on a visa that has long since expired. If he were to get tossed out of this country, she says, her brother would have nowhere to go.
Fortunately for the family, such a fate does not appear imminent. Authorities say they are busy chasing other, more urgent cases. Still, Button’s status leaves him vulnerable to deportation at any time. And his 39-year-old sister has found herself frustrated at every turn in her attempts to make him a legitimate U.S. resident.
Instead of hiding her brother from authorities, Coursey says she’s done everything in her power to work with them to solve the problem, to no avail. Federal officials have told her that because her brother’s case is of low priority, the soonest it is likely to come up for review is 2017.
People on all sides of the immigration issue say the family’s situation is one existing laws don’t adequately address. Even a staunch foe of illegal immigration agrees that in this case, the usual rules probably shouldn’t apply.
“In the grand immigration debate, people talk about all the undocumented” people living in America, Coursey said recently, sitting at her dining-room table opposite her brother, who favored her with a shy smile.
“We’re documented,” she said. “We’ve followed all the rules. We’ve done everything we can. We’ve hit a brick wall.”
Trinidad to Suwanee
Lisa and Ian Button were born in England to a schizophrenic mother incapable of looking after them. Their aunt in Trinidad took them in.
In 1987, Lisa came to America, sponsored by a Connecticut family. That allowed her to get that all-important document that would-be citizens must have, the green card, issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She married, divorced, got a degree in forensic psychology and decided life in the Northeast was not to her liking.
“I had friends moving to Georgia, telling me how great it was,” Coursey said. In 1997, she boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta. She got a job working at a credit center and rented an apartment in Norcross.
In 2002, she went on a date with a slim, dark-haired man named Ricardo Coursey. The next year, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She and Ricardo married in March 2005.
That same year, she initiated the process to get Ian a green card, filing as a sibling sponsor, so he could become a naturalized American citizen, too. But before she could complete the process, the aunt looking after him died in March 2006.
Ricardo and Lisa boarded a jet bound for Trinidad to get her brother. On the advice of a U.S. Embassy official there, they got a 90-day visa for him, assuming they could get him cleared to remain permanently in America when they returned to Suwanee.
She would soon learn otherwise.
Waiting for a knock
Coursey has a 5-inch stack of letters, faxes and e-mails documenting her efforts to keep her brother here legally. Most of the correspondence occurred between April and June 2006, when Button was here lawfully on his three-month visa.
On April 4, 2006, Coursey sent a 15-page fax to immigration officials. She supplied them with passport information, details of her aunt’s death, birth certificates and a physician’s assessment that her brother could not look after himself. The case, Coursey wrote, was “an extreme emergency and humanitarian situation.”
The next day, she visited the Atlanta offices of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). An official there told her that Button should not have come to America on a 90-day visa if she intended him to stay longer; he should have had a tourist’s visa, which can be extended. The CIS worker also dashed her hopes for a speedy resolution. Button’s case — an adult sibling sponsoring an adult sibling — was low-priority, he said. It likely wouldn’t be reviewed for 12 years.
Coursey wrote to U.S. Rep. John Linder, her congressional representative, asking for help. “[Ian] has nowhere to go and we do not know what else to do or who to contact,” she told him.
A series of e-mails between Coursey and Linder staffer Debra Poirot underscore the sister’s growing panic as the expiration date of Button’s 90-day visa neared.
“This is SO wrong,” she wrote Poirot. “I’ve been doing everything the way I’ve been asked to do ...”
On June 7, she wrote to the National Visa Center, begging it to expedite Button’s case. Looking after her brother, she wrote, “is my duty.”
As the visa deadline of June 28 approached, Coursey considered leaving the country with her brother, then re-entering with a new visa for her sibling, as some officials had suggested. She decided against it. What if agents stopped her brother for some unknown reason and he couldn’t return?
June 28 came — and with it, a fluttering in the stomach. She spent the day wondering if agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the division charged with the apprehension and deportation of illegal residents, would knock on her door.
More than three years later, she still fears hearing that knock.
Problem, fix rare
The Button case is a tough one, federal officials and immigration specialists agree. The law does not recognize that he has the mental capacity of a child, whose case could be expedited. Instead, said Coursey, he’s a little boy in a man’s 6-foot-2 body.
“This is where nice, middle-age people find themselves in a terrible fix,” said lawyer Sue Colussy, who oversees immigration issues for Catholic Charities, an Atlanta-based nonprofit social services organization.
She suggested that Coursey ask Linder, or U.S. Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, to make Button a U.S. citizen by filing a “private bill” — legislation addressing Button’s case only.
But those actions, she conceded, “are very, very rare.”
An aide to Linder declined to discuss the case specifically.
“Congressman Linder ... and his office have always applied a very strict privacy policy when dealing with case work questions,” Derick Corbett, a spokesman for the Duluth Republican, wrote in an e-mail. “We are certainly not through with this,” he added in a follow-up e-mail.
Kent Goodrich, assistant special agent in charge of ICE’s Atlanta offices, said that Coursey has little to fear.
“Based on the number of individuals we have in this country who really need to be removed, he [Button] does not rank anywhere near the top” of the agency’s list of potential deportees, he said.
‘Nowhere else to go’
Still, the dilemma facing Button and his sister highlights a system that needs fixing, said Joe Rosen, a Smyrna immigration lawyer.
“It’s not set up for a case like this,” said Rosen, a former FBI and U.S. Customs agent. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Even people who take a hard stand on illegal immigration admit that Button’s story is different than most.
“This is a very, very, very sad story,” said Marietta resident D.A. King, president and founder of the Dustin Inman Society, which opposes illegal immigration and open borders. “I would help them if I could.”
Button, meantime, enjoys life. He has his own bedroom in a two-story house fronted by an immaculate lawn. Three times a week he attends a Gwinnett training school where he and other disabled people learn job and life skills. He had a girlfriend, but they broke up.
“I think I am happy to be here,” Button said.
If he had to go? “I don’t know,” he said. “I have nowhere else to go.”
He rose from the dining room table, smiled and said he was going to his room. Coursey watched him go. Button stepped as quietly as a little boy ordered to bed.
“I just want to go to a judge and present my case,” she said. “Anyone with any common sense can see that we are just trying to do the right thing.”
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