FORT SCOTT - U.S. Magistrate Judge Jennifer B. Wieland got almost all the way through the sentence.
“It is my great honor to be the first to say congratulations, my fellow,” she said, then stopped, audibly emotional, before finishing the sentence. “Americans.”
She did not speak again for about seven seconds as the crowd applauded.
Wieland was presiding Wednesday morning on the parade ground at Fort Scott National Historic Site, where 22 people from 17 countries took the oath of allegiance and became U.S. citizens.
She built her remarks around her great-grandmother.
"As I mentioned before, I am a United States magistrate judge. My great-grandmother was an immigrant to this country," she said.
Wieland said her great-grandmother, who was Jewish, was born in 1888, the daughter of a butcher in a part of Eastern Europe then controlled by the Russian Empire.
"And when she came to the United States through the Port of New York at an immigration station called Ellis Island beneath the Statue of Liberty, she changed her name to Bessie Smith," Wieland said.
"Bessie worked at a shirtwaist factory in New York until she earned enough money to move to Cleveland, Ohio."
In Cleveland, Bessie met and married Wieland's great-grandfather, Wieland said. They had four children, among them Wieland's grandmother Esther.
"Esther lived to be 96, and she had the opportunity to meet all three of my children who were her great-grandchildren before she passed away in 2014," Wieland said.
"And I tell you this story, not because it is unique, but because it is ordinary," Wieland said. "It's just one chapter in the American story."
Wieland quoted then-President Barack Obama, who said in 2013 that what makes somebody an American is “not just blood or birth, but allegiance to our founding principles and the faith in the idea that anyone from anywhere can write the next great chapter of our story.”
“Anyone from anywhere can write the next great chapter of the American story, even someone from Kansas,” Wieland added.
"And so with your citizenship today, the future of our 250-year-old nation is now yours to help shape," Wieland said.
She then told the new citizens that the most important benefit of the citizenship they had just received is the right to vote, and pointed to her grandmother again.
"My grandmother Esther never missed an election," she said.
Wieland quoted former President Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Our American heritage is threatened as much by our own indifference as by an unscrupulous office seeker or the most powerful foreign threat. The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter."
"The future of the republic is in your hands," Wieland said. "So I urge you do not be indifferent. Remember the oath that you took today to support and defend the Constitution."
The new citizens did not have to wait long to act on the judge's advice. Directly after the ceremony, Park Ranger Carl Brenner of the Fort Scott National Historic Site pointed them toward a voter registration station set up on the grounds.
Brenner said the State Department also had a table with passport information and invited the new citizens to have a photograph taken with Wieland.
'It took me 12 years'
For Liliia Harris, a Ukrainian-born physician at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Wednesday closed out a 12-year process.
"I came 12 years ago when the issue started in my country," Harris told the Monitor.
She arrived on a student visa and, six years later, met her husband and began working as a physician in training, Harris said. She now has a family here.
Asked whether she still had family in Ukraine, Harris said her parents and her sister are no longer there.
"I still have my grandparents and I still have my aunt and cousins there," she said.
Harris said she took her husband's last name in part for the sake of the people she treats.
"I got married and changed to something that my patients can pronounce actually," she said.
