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30092: Hermantin(News)Split decision: Deportation redefines families (fwd)
From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>
Split decision: Deportation redefines families
As more longtime residents are deported, many are forced to choose whether to
leave their U.S.-born children behind
By Ruth Morris
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
February 25, 2007
Port-au-prince · The couple stood amid the tap-tap buses and trash heaps last
June, freshly deported and disbelieving.
They had left their two small children in South Florida with relatives, unsure
what to tell them, without a proper goodbye. Now, standing on a sun-baked
street in Haiti, they realized they lacked money for even a phone call. The
father wore his uniform from a Coral Springs gas station, the same clothes he
wore 17 days earlier when federal immigration agents came to their Sunrise
home.
"I feel like I'm not a human; I couldn't even talk that day," he said, four
months later. "When I talk to my kids [by phone], sometimes they don't talk
back. It makes me very sad. They call somebody else mommy and daddy."
These two parents are among a growing number of foreign nationals rounded up by
an expanding web of fugitive squads run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The units target terror suspects and convicted criminals, along with immigrants
who, like the Haitian couple, failed to report for deportation after losing a
legal battle to stay in the United States.
Immigration rights groups say the trend has a troubling side effect: a growing
number of children left behind. The removals often tear families apart,
advocates say, as parents leave their U.S.-born children with relatives and
friends.
"The government is creating a different group of children, of orphans, who will
need all kinds of assistance," said Nora Sandigo, executive director of the
American Fraternity, a South Florida immigrant advocacy group.
The couple, who are in hiding from political enemies in Haiti, asked not to be
identified for security reasons. For several years they led a quiet suburban
life in South Florida until their arrests in June.
They said they worked 70 hours a week in Broward County gas stations, she as a
clerk and he as a manager, paid income taxes and tried not to draw attention to
themselves. Their son and daughter were born in South Florida.
Last June, immigration agents parked before dawn outside their yellow,
single-story home in a Sunrise neighborhood marked by scattered toys and
tricycles. The mother said she walked out the door in a robe to move her car,
and the agents moved in.
In the chaotic moments that followed, the agents asked for ID and told the
family to get dressed. The mother said she told the agents her two children
were in the house and pleaded to be left with them. The agents detained both
parents, the family said, and left their children with an aunt who also lived
in the house and stood bewildered in the living room. There was no time for
goodbyes.
"My head was spinning like crazy. I was dizzy, and I started vomiting,"
recalled the mother.
The next time they saw their 2-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, they were
in a Pompano Beach detention center. The small boy didn't immediately recognize
his father in his detention jumpsuit. When it was time to leave, the girl
grabbed her father's hand, assuming they would all leave together.
"I can't go," he remembered saying, weakly.
Few refute the federal government's right to deport immigrants who, like the
Haitian couple, had their day in court, lost, and then ignored a judge's order
that they leave the country.
An immigration judge had denied the parents' application for political asylum
-- a claim based on the father's assertion that political enemies in Haiti
killed his mother and siblings.
By remaining in the United States, the couple fell into a category known as
absconders. At any given time, more than 590,000 absconders are a priority for
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and account for a growing number of all
deportees.
Reshuffling a family
Advocates for immigrants argue that unlike many of the men and women arrested
and turned back at the Mexican border or at sea, absconders have been allowed
to live here for years, buying homes, and ushering their children into an
all-American lifestyle.
Those seeking tougher limits on immigration say such dilemmas do not add up to
a policy problem. Rather, they say, parents bear the responsibility for
bringing their children into an untenable situation.
The day they were arrested, the Haitian parents quickly decided to ask family
members to take care of the children, reasoning they were returning to huge
risks in their homeland. That evening, the children's uncle, Fremiot Phadael,
42, picked them up and drove them to his home in Riviera Beach.
"That day I didn't eat. I kept thinking, `I have no other alternative but to
take the children, but it's not going to be easy for us,'" recalled the slim
and soft-spoken Phadael, a U.S. citizen who drives a tour bus and has three
children of his own. As he spoke, he held his nephew in his lap. The boy curled
up silently, and did not move for more than an hour.
Already stretched financially, living in a house with almost no furniture,
Phadael and his wife considered taking out a second mortgage to help pay added
school fees. His wife, Sheila, 36, who holds a green card and works two
full-time jobs as a nurse's assistant, paid special attention to the older
child. She bought the girl pretty dresses and white patent leather shoes,
expenses she hadn't anticipated.
The Riviera Beach family also ran into complicated legal issues involving the
children's care and their parents' assets. They tried to transfer the girl to
their school district, but were overwhelmed by the paperwork necessary to gain
guardianship of the girl. The children's parents had no opportunity to tie up
loose ends, Phadael said, and their financial security began to unravel.
The sister who took care of the Sunrise home fell behind on the bills. The
family tried to sell it. Eventually, they found a renter, but the rent checks
never appeared, and the parents found themselves embroiled, from afar, in an
eviction process.
As the weeks ran on, the family also grappled with what to tell the children
about their parents' departure, opting to say nothing. The children seemed to
know anyway, they reasoned.
A giant step backward
Once, the 5-year-old girl pointed to a portrait of Phadael's family and asked
why she wasn't in it.
Then, speaking to her mother in Haiti by phone, the child asked, "Are you
really alive, or are you dead?"
Sometimes, her mother said she fell into fits of worry, concerned that her
little girl wasn't eating. When that happened the mother asked her
sister-in-law to put the phone to the girl's jaw. She listened to the chewing.
"They tell you your children are eating well, but the doubt lingers," she said.
"It's not easy to describe."
Back in Haiti, the parents kept moving, afraid their political enemies would
come after them. Kidnappings had become rampant during their absence. Haitians
with U.S. ties are thought to have money, making them especially vulnerable.
The couple moved frequently between the homes of family and friends to avoid
detection.
From a tidy Sunrise street, they moved to a maze of dirt roads and open
sewers. The journey to meet them winds past dogs with protruding ribs, a man
selling sugar cane from a wheelbarrow, a dead goat with stiff legs poking the
air.
"Haiti is a hard place," said the mother, sitting on a stifling patio, ringed
by an iron security grate, weeks after her deportation. "I would not like my
children to come here. I myself don't have any safety. I don't want to expose
my children to that."
Their homeland greeted them with an unemployment rate near 70 percent. There
were no jobs.
"The little money I saved, I'm using," said the mother. "I want my children to
go to college and have a profession. ... I don't see how we can pay for college
now."
In October, a new split altered the family dynamic.
The boy's overwhelmed relatives packed a suitcase and flew him to Haiti to
reunite with his parents. The couple was still unsure of their security
situation, but they decided to give it a try. As their son hadn't started
school yet, the move seemed less disruptive to him, his parents said. Their
daughter should stay in the United States as long as possible, they decided,
since she already had started school and had better opportunities there.
A second aunt, in Royal Palm Beach, agreed to take the girl, to share the
financial burden. She put her mind to properly explaining the situation to the
child, who continued to ask for her parents.
"I took her to the park, and then I sat her down there," said the aunt, who has
legal status but still requested anonymity.
She pointed to a small leather couch next to a sliding patio door, where her
own children had parked two Barbie dune buggies.
"I told her that her mom was not born here. And they don't want her here. They
sent her back to her country," she recalled in a quiet, tight voice. "I said,
`Your mom loves you. And she let you stay here. One day you can go back to
Haiti, but she wants a good life for you. ... You stay here.'"
Ruth Morris can be reached at rmorris@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5012.
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