Father frustrated in effort to bring daughter to U.S.

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Dance instructor Ricardo Sopin of Saratoga Springs is still working toward a goal he set in January after an earthquake devestated his native Haiti, killing almost a quarter of a million people: Bringing his 8-year-old daughter, Marsha, to New York to live with him.  Almost eight months after Sopin journeyed to Port Au Prince to search for her (not knowing whether she was alive and fearing she was not) he and his friends are trying. 

"It's like, instead of moving forward it feels like it's moving backward," Sopin told CBS 6 Wednesday night. 

Most frustrating of all, according to Sopin's friend and employer, Leslie Valencia, has been the inability of Sopin's attorney to follow changes in legal requirements that might have allowed Marsha to enter the U.S. months ago.  Valencia, who runs the Arthur Murray dance studio in Saratoga Springs, says an attorney who works for Arthur Murray International took on the task at no charge to Sopin.  She says the attorney's work amounted to following the steps posted on the ICE web site.

"The embassy and immigrations have updates or openings," Valencia said, "I don't want to call them loopholes but, new laws that actually could have brought Marsha here sooner, but the attorney said, 'I don't know what's going on at the embassy. If you know someone there, have them call me."

Sopin and Valencia agree Marsha might be home already if he were a U.S. citizen, rather than a permanent resident.

Valencia says Sopin has been contacted by the offices of elected leaders such as Senator Chuck Schumer, Congressman Scott Murphy and from Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, but none of that has produced the result Sopin wants.

He says found his daughter in late January under a tent awaiting medical attention, alone. Her mother died from injuries she received in the earthquake. Sopin's mother had her legs crushed. Sopin's best friend escaped seemingly unharmed except for a cut on one of his legs which became infected and led to the amputation of the leg.  He says his mother and that friend have been taking care of Marsha, who's now going to school and seemed happy the last time he visited. Early on, he had a piink bedroom decorated and ready for her to move into, but in the months since, it has become too sad for him to see it empty and the much or the rooms contents have been put into storage.

"Everybody wants this little girl to come to her home," says Valencia, "to her new home - with her father, where she belongs."