Teenager’s Woes Didn’t End With U.S. Trip : Immigration: Father’s arrest in her molestation resulted in order to send her back to Romania.

Thirteen-year-old Roberta could hear the promise of the United States pouring from her father’s voice as she sat at home in Romania listening on the telephone.

Though she never met him face to face, she knew he would be her savior. He would sweep her away from the country she learned to hate after being abandoned at age 1 by her mother and forced to live with relatives that either beat or neglected her.

And at first Roberta’s father seemed to come through, making arrangements in 1997 for the pretty daughter he last saw as a newborn to come live with him in La Verne.

But this would be no fairy tale for Roberta, a pseudonym given to the now 15-year-old girl by her lawyers. Instead, her short but bitter life grew even more horrific in the United States.

First came her father’s sexual assault, which landed him in jail just two months after she arrived. Now, because of her father’s conviction, Roberta stands to be deported back to Romania, where her aunt and uncle no longer want her and her mother is nowhere to be found.

A Superior Court judge recently ruled that she must be handed over to the Romanian government, a sentence that would probably land her in one of that country’s unsanitary orphanages, said her attorney, Daniel Grunfeld.

Joined by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Grunfeld’s Public Counsel Law Center is fighting to appeal that ruling in federal court.

They received a preliminary injunction Monday, allowing Roberta to stay until the various government bureaucracies that intend to weigh in on the decision have their say.

“I have no reason to go back there,” Roberta said of her birthplace near Bucharest. “It’s just like they’re telling me that tomorrow I have to go back on the streets and live on my own.”

Grunfeld is arguing that Roberta’s case falls under the federal Violence Against Women Act, a law implemented in 1994 to protect immigrant spouses and children from abuse by a U.S. citizen.

Earlier this month, Juvenile Court Judge Stanley Genser decided it would be in the teenager’s best interest to try to reunite her with the mother she barely knows and who cannot afford to care for Roberta. In lieu of that, Roberta would be handed over to Romanian officials, Genser ruled.

Grunfeld, whose firm took over Roberta’s case after Genser’s ruling, argues that the state has no authority to deport Roberta.

“This poor kid has been through enough,” Grunfeld said. “She should be living a normal suburban life, having crushes on boys and listening to bad music.”

Until recently, Roberta has been doing just that. A perpetual optimist, she now lives with a foster family in Pomona. A friend of that family hopes to adopt her.

“I believe the good in life will always prevail,” she said after describing a life in Romania full of abuse and neglect.

Her paternal uncle and aunt kept her in their house, she said, solely because her father sent the occasional check, perhaps $100 every few months, to help pay for her clothes and food.

“All they wanted was the money,” she said. “They didn’t want me at all. Whenever I talked to my dad on the phone, they would tell me what to say, that I was dressed really nice but that we needed more money.”

Since she learned her father--whose name also was withheld by lawyers--lived in the United States, Roberta thought of him constantly, regarding him like a guardian angel she needed to find.

“I always knew I would come to America,” she said. On the phone, “my father would tell me that he would come and get me someday.”

During the days surrounding Christmas 1997, Roberta’s father made good on his promise.

A truck driver, he picked her up at an airport in New York and drove her across the country, home to La Verne, she said.

At first they were happy together, she said. With her father’s fiancee living with them, it seemed as if she finally had a family.

Then, two months after she arrived, her father began abusing Roberta. She told his girlfriend and he was soon arrested, Grunfeld said.

“I don’t think anybody should have to go through what I go through,” Roberta said.

But as she watches afternoon talk shows and waits for government officials to determine her destiny, she realizes many do.

“I see people on the TV and realize that is life,” she said. “I want to tell them all to have faith. You have to think positive. That’s what helped me through my problems, so far.”