A Jericho family celebrated Pakistan Day on Sunday, March 23 with one extra person in their company.
113-year-old Sadar Khatoon had been fighting to get a visa to join her family in the United States since 2019.
After years of screening and tests, Khatoon received here visa on March 6 and flew into the country from Pakistan on March 12.
Her family was one of several to celebrate Pakistan’s Independence Day at the Shaheen Restaurant in Hicksville on Sunday.
“It’s only appropriate that on Pakistan Day, we are all here to celebrate this family, who after a long time has finally been able to come together here in America, only because of the great relationship we share between the United States and Pakistan,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi, who hosted the event.
Khatoon is the second-oldest person in the United States, and her son-in-law, Adam Muhammad Azam, said that she is in perfect health.
But entering the country wasn’t simple for Khatoon.
She first applied for a visa six years ago but did not see much progress. Azam said she had just been in the queue for a green card before he contacted Suozzi in 2024. Azam said that Khatoon had to undergo extensive treatment even though she was not sick.
“My mother-in-law has no disease at all,” Azam said. “She can walk, talk, go to the bathroom, eat, she’s witty, she likes to wear nice clothes, she’s still living like a normal young person.”
Azam said he eventually received that phone call saying that his mother-in-law was free to come to the United States.
Suozzi serves as the co-chair of the bipartisan Pakistan Caucus and has advocated for Khatoon to be reconnected with her family. The rest of her family came to the United States 35 years ago. Azam said that Khatoon had briefly visited twice during the 1990s but had not been in the country since then.
“We were over the moon because she’s here in the U.S.,” Azam said. “The mother is happy, the daughter is happy, I am happy, everybody’s happy.”
Azam said that his family wanted to make sure that they could take care of Khatoon at her age.
Khatoon was born on Jan. 1, 1912, in Larkana, a city in the Sindh province of Pakistan.
The area was still part of India at the time and remained that way until 1947.
Pakistan Day, on March 23, marks the day that the Lahore Resolution was approved in 1940, which led to the creation of a Muslim state away from Brisith-controlled India and the day that the first Constitution of Pakistan was adopted in 1956.
Suozzi presented Khatoon with a U.S. flag that was flown over the Capitol and a citation during the celebration.
A press release from Suozzi’s office said that Khatoon told a translator “God bless. I love America” during Sunday’s events.
