YOU LOOKED THE OTHER WAY WHEN I TORE BABIES FROM THEIR MOTHER'S ARMS, DIDN'T YOU, JPP LIBS?
Alexis Molina was just 10 years old when his mother was abruptly cut out of his life and his childhood unraveled overnight. “She went for her papers,” he says. “And she never came back.”
Alexis’ father, Rony Molina, a landscaper, was born in Guatemala but lived here for 12 years and is an American citizen. Alexis and his 8-year-old brother, Steve, were Americans, too. So was their 19-year-old stepsister, Evelin. But their mother, Sandra, who lived here illegally, was deported to Guatemala in 2010.
“How can my country not allow a mother to be with her children, especially when they are so young and they need her?” Rony Molina asks. “And especially when they are Americans?”
Record number of American children are being left without a parent — despite President Barack Obama’s promise .
Nearly 45,000 such parents were removed in the first six months of 2012, said the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At least 5,100 U.S. citizen children in 22 states lived in foster care, according to an estimate by the Applied Research Center, a New York-based advocacy organization, which first reported on such cases in 2011.
And an unknown number of those children were put up for adoption against the wishes of their parents, who, once deported, are often helpless to fight when a U.S. judge decides that their children are better off here.
“I had no idea what was happening,” says Janna Hakim of the morning in 2010 when a loud knocking at her Brooklyn apartment door jolted her awake. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. Her Palestinian mother, Faten, was in the kitchen baking the pastries she sold to local stores.
Janna, then 16, and her siblings were all born here. None knew that their mother was in the U.S. illegally — or that a deportation order from years earlier meant she could be whisked away by ICE agents. “I am not a criminal. I am the mother of American children, and they need me, especially the younger ones,” she cried over the phone from Ramallah, where she is living with her own mother after 20 years away. “How can a country break up families like this?”
“When nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when all this is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it,” Obama said during his first run for president in 2008.
https://www.denverpost.com/2012/08/25/u-s-immigration-policy-splits-families-when-parents-are-deported/
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