{"id":370312,"date":"2026-10-11T12:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T12:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/370312\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T12:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T12:32:08","slug":"immigration-bureaucracy-keeps-children-from-their-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/370312\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigration bureaucracy keeps children from their parents"},"content":{"rendered":"

On June 12, I walked across the Peace Bridge<\/a> from Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario with my client Mariama, a 32-year-old asylum-seeking Guinean mother, her 2-year-old daughter and her 8-month-old son, an American citizen.<\/p>\n

Moments later, Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)<\/a> officers escorted a slim, well-dressed man holding a little boy\u2019s hand. My client turned, saw him, and fell into his arms: it was her husband Mamadou \u2014 the children\u2019s father \u2014 and her 5-year-old stepson. She hadn\u2019t seen either in eight months, Mamadou was meeting his baby for the first time.<\/p>\n

All seemed as it should be. But it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Mamadou\u2019s 11- and eight-year-old sons were detained hours away in a Bronx congregate care facility by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)<\/a>, which refused to release them to join their family at the border interview we had scheduled. ORR\u2019s intransigence showcased this administration\u2019s senseless hostility to family unity, in stark contrast to Canada\u2019s continuing commitment to it.<\/p>\n

This surreal reverse flight from the United States to Canada (a bizarro version of my Holocaust-survivor grandparents\u2019 journey from a German displaced persons camp to Ellis Island) began when Mariama arrived at JFK in October 2025, very pregnant, with her young daughter and her stepsons. Fleeing persecution in Guinea, she traveled ahead of Mamadou, who planned to follow a week later.<\/p>\n

Mariama, whose first language is Fulani, explained in grade-school French that she was seeking asylum. CBP officers cancelled her visitor\u2019s visa and placed her in expedited removal. Despite a 2021 Department of Homeland Security directive<\/a> that pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women should not be detained except in very limited circumstances, CBP held the visibly pregnant Mariama and her family in airport secondary detention for a week.<\/p>\n

Mariama slept with the children on a couch in a cold waiting room. An officer escorted them to a crowded public bathroom, and she could not bathe. Officials then deemed her stepsons unaccompanied children and placed them in ORR custody \u2014 unmoved by her signed, notarized guardianship agreement and by the family\u2019s terror and tears.<\/p>\n

Mariama underwent a credible fear interview without an attorney, with a French, not Fulani interpreter, her fear spurring preterm labor. Five days after her arrival, CBP brought Mariama under guard to Jamaica Hospital, where she delivered her son early. When the hospital contacted NYC Administration for Children\u2019s Services for respite foster care for her daughter, a colleague there alerted me, and I filed an emergency habeas petition in federal court.<\/p>\n

A judge ordered Mariama\u2019s release; she and her babies moved into a family shelter. But the next eight months brought uncertainty, fear, and isolation. Mamadou\u2019s U.S. visa had been cancelled, leaving him no legal way to join them. Mariama could not safely return to Guinea, but nor could she find sanctuary here, when the government treated her like a criminal and tore her stepsons away.<\/p>\n

Mariama immediately applied to sponsor her stepsons, but ORR officials rejected her application. They acknowledged she was the boys\u2019 stepmother but said she lacked the correct documents and provided no further assistance.<\/p>\n

Under the 2008 William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act<\/a>, ORR must promptly place unaccompanied children in the least restrictive setting in their best interest, usually by releasing them to sponsors. Yet ORR never identified an alternate plan. Alone, the boys languished, attending multiple deportation hearings.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, in May, ORR solicited a new sponsorship application from Mariama. The timing was notable: Mamadou had just reached Canada and filed a refugee application. Under the family exception to Canada\u2019s safe third country rule, relatives can join a refugee applicant\u2019s claim. There was now a path to reunification \u2014 in Canada. But ORR told the boys\u2019 attorney it would not release them to Canada.<\/p>\n

Mamadou\u2019s Canadian attorney scheduled a June 12 border interview for all five family members in the U.S. The boys\u2019 attorney and I appealed to ORR leadership. We spoke with the Canadian consulate and the family\u2019s deportation officers, who supported release. A member of Congress advocated zealously for the boys, their constituents.<\/p>\n

ORR leadership exuded grave concern, calling it irresponsible to \u201csuddenly\u201d release the boys to their DNA-confirmed biological father. But they couldn\u2019t articulate why detaining children in the U.S., away from family, served their best interest more than reuniting them in a country willing to hear their refugee claim. ORR showed no appetite for contacting Canadian officials to problem-solve. Their position was puzzling not only in its cruelty but in its illogic. Wasn\u2019t this administration doing everything possible to purge the U.S. of non-citizens?<\/p>\n

On June 12, Mariama and Mamadou held hands in Fort Erie\u2019s Peace Bridge Newcomer Centre, a brightly lit, family-friendly space connected to CBSA\u2019s offices, watching their daughter in the play kitchen while their son burbled in his father\u2019s arms. I kept expecting the stepsons to magically appear. They never did.<\/p>\n

Later that weekend, Mamadou called me. At 3 a.m. the morning after the interview, ORR staff shook the boys awake, drove them to Canada, and left them at the CBSA office, without alerting their attorney or parents. The agency that purported to care about unaccompanied children fought an orderly and humane reunion, then essentially dumped an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old, without a caregiver, at another country\u2019s doorstep.<\/p>\n

Family separation causes documented, lasting psychological harm<\/a> to children while offering no public benefit.<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t need to be scientists to feel a separated parent\u2019s pain. Another client recently had a panic attack in my office, clawing at me and crying that she\u2019d sooner die than be deported and ripped from her daughter. Mariama\u2019s story is not isolated: turbocharged detentions and deportations separate parents from children every day. This incomprehensible institutional cruelty can only weaken what is great about the U.S.<\/p>\n

When Mamadou and Mariama send me photos now of their family of seven posing exultantly beside Canadian monuments, I am reminded of individual human resilience. I\u2019m not sure our collective humanity, here in the United States, is as resilient.<\/p>\n

Schonfeld is attorney-in-charge, immigration for the Center for Family Representation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On June 12, I walked across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario with my client…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63,299],"class_list":["post-370312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}