Sometimes not even Congress can help.

When Romanians Veronica and Julian Mart won the 1999 visa lottery, they thought they had won an 8-year fight to stay in the United States.

Veronica Mart, a native of Romania, helps clean up leaves. The family remains in the United States only through her temperary work visa as a chemical engineer at Mitsubishi Silicon America. (Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian)

It made them eligible to apply for the 55,000 permanent visas chosen from 8 million applicants worldwide -- if they applied quickly, which they did.

Then the Portland office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied their application. Rep. Darlene Hooley, D-Ore., took the Salem family's case to the Oregon congressional delegation, to the INS district director and finally last July, to the House floor. She introduced a bill granting the Marts and their two children permanent residency. She hand-carried the case to Doris Meissner, then INS commissioner.

Meissner promised a review. Six weeks ago, the INS said it had made a mistake. The Marts were eligible for a visa -- but all the visas were gone, awarded to other people.

"There is no good fix," says acting District Director Charles DeMore, whose review acknowledged the mistake. "All I can say is we're very sorry. We have no legal means" to give them a visa.

Adelina Mart (second from left) plays with the Vivace String Quartet. Friend Annie Burke (third from left) makes the quartet laugh during a rehersal. Far left Rebecca Harris, Jordan Bagnail is right. (Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian)

Across the country, the powerful as well as the powerless run into the brick wall of the INS. Members of Congress, federal judges, mayors, clergy and community leaders have on many occasions tried, without avail, to move the agency -- often on cases that much later even the INS agreed were valid.

Veronica Mart, 39, and her husband, Julian, 42, came to the United States in 1991 as visitors and applied for political asylum. Their application was denied. They pursued work permits and, over the yeras, the visa lottery.

Portland INS denied their application, saying that Veronica Mart had earlier overstayed her 1991 visa. The couple took the case to court, where U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Jones showed frustration at his inability to override the INS.

"I don't have the legal authority to right what I perceive to be a wrong," the judge said. The Marts then argued a different point of law, and Jones agreed to review the case. It is now pending.

In July, 11 friends of the Marts' children took a petition with 1,000 signatures to Hooley, who wanted the private bill to pass to prove that "government works."

"This was the most egregious case I've seen," Hooley says. The Marts and their children, Paul, 10, and Adelina, 14, remain in Salem only because of Veronica's temporary work permit through her employer, Mitsubishi Silicon America.

Adelina Mart's friend Rebecca Harris made a poster for the Mart family's case in her humanities class at Howard Street Charter School. (Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian)

Paul Mart has not been able to work since he lost his work visa when his company closed two years ago. DeMore said he could help Paul, an engineer, secure a work permit, but little else. He suggested they try the lottery again, and possibly another private relief bill to Congress.

Pushed by elected leaders
In Columbus, Ga., Mayor Bobby Peters has written letters and gone to immigration court asking that local businessman Jong Ik Lee be released from the DeKalb County Jail in Decatur, Ga.

Lee did wrong, the mayor says. He sold counterfeit goods such as knock-off handbags. But he pleaded guilty, surrendered $500,000 to the government, worked with agents for several months to nab others and served a year in federal prison.

Now, Lee has severe heart problems and has been ordered deported to South Korea. He has a wife and two children, all citizens, and petitions for his release signed by 7,000 supporters. He's been in the county jail since February.

"He's paid his debt, but it's not enough," Peters says of the INS' perspective.

Congress introduced more than 70 private immigration laws this session. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., tried to prevent a political ally's son from being deported under the 1996 law he helped craft. Rep. David Wu, D-Ore, introduced three bills on behalf of three Chinese boys held in Multnomah County's Donald E. Long juvenile jail for more than eight months.

The bills, along with the Marts bill, vanished in committee.

But 17 of the bills became law. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., got a law granting permanent residency for Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese activist who spent 29 years in Chinese prisons for his pro-democracy stance. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, got a bill for a British woman who also won the visa lottery but lost her bid because of a lost file at the National Visa Center. A bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., allowed a young disabled Russian and his mother, both longtime Portland residents, to gain permanent residency to continue treatment at Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Public scrutiny also appears to help move the INS.

Amid critical news reports, the INS helped return the German wife of a U.S. citizen to Oregon after it separated her from her breast-feeding daughter and deported her three months earlier. A Portland immigration official granted permanent residency to a pregnant Beaverton woman who had waged three years of appeals by lawyers, Mormon church leaders and the California congressional delegation.

"I used to lay awake at night and think, 'Have I studied enough case law? Have I read enough books?' " says Alicia Triche, a lawyer with Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Los Angeles. "Now, I go to sleep and think, 'Have I called enough reporters?' "