Passengers From Golden Venture Plead for End to Their Legal Limbo

Passengers on the Golden Venture, the steamer that ran aground in Queens more than a decade ago, are pleading for Washington to put an end to their legal limbo.

It has been 13 years since the ship, loaded with nearly 300 illegal Chinese immigrants, hit the Rockaway peninsula after a perilous journey, but scores of the passengers have yet to have their futures in America decided.

On that night, 10 people are known to have died. Six disappeared, and the rest were detained and put into deportation proceedings. About 220 survivors, however, are believed to live in America. Some never left; others returned illegally.

Last year, the human smuggler, or snakehead, who oversaw the operation that sold them tickets costing at least $30,000, became the 23rd person to be convicted in the case, but no legal conclusion has been handed down for many of the passengers.

At a press conference in Chinatown yesterday, passengers and their advocates linked their legal challenges to the national immigration debate raging in Congress, urging lawmakers to move toward offering more legal avenues for immigration and more flexibility in the system, rather than making felons of all illegal immigrants.

"We took these gentlemen to be heroes, not liabilities to the country," a lawyer who took on the immigrants' case when they were put in immigration detention in York, Pa., Craig Trebilcock, said.

"This administration says it's for democracy and the dignity of men," Mr. Trebilcock, an active member of the Army Reserve who has served in Bosnia, Iraq, and Germany, said. "Right here in New York City today we've got a group of men who came to this country fleeing communists and tyranny."

The Chinese men, many of whom now have American citizen children, recounted the horrors of the journey, from being caught in a typhoon near the southern tip of Africa to using bags as flotation devices to survive off the coast of Queens. When the boat ran aground, one survivor recalled, "We thought we were going to die that night." Another said his last memory was crawling to shore, only to wake up hours later with his arms handcuffed to a hospital bed.

The Golden Venture shipwreck, which received national attention, came not long after the first attack on the World Trade Center. The Clinton administration quickly ordered them deported to send a message that it would not tolerate illegal immigration. Nearly half were sent back.

"Their misfortune was coming at a certain point in our history when the anti-immigration tide was high," Mr. Trebilcock said. "We got scared and we got stupid, and so we locked them up and treated them like dirt."

After four years in immigration jail, President Clinton in 1997 awarded 53 passengers parole. Still, they were never granted permanent legal status and could be deported at any point.

"I live in daily fear that I will be deported," said one of the passengers, Michael Chen, who went on to open a restaurant in Philadelphia. Mr. Chen and the other survivors are the subject of a documentary on the Golden Venture that debuted last night at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"We have paid dearly for our presence," said Arming He, who now owns a restaurant in Fort Myers, Fla. Thirteen years after first setting foot on American soil, "We look to President Bush to help," he said, promising that the immigrants would "make America proud."