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US Children growing up without Immigrant (Haitian) deported mom

By Dianna Smith

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, October 22, 2006

WEST PALM BEACH ? They are ages 5 and 3. Twin boys and a dainty girl too young to know about the impoverished country of Haiti, too young to be told that Haiti is where their mother is now trapped.

"My mommy, she's in the hospital," the boys often say to those who arrive at their cozy home, where photographs displayed on shelves give visitors a glimpse of a family with a happy, hopeful life.

And it was. Until seven months ago.

The boys point to a framed picture of a pretty woman in a yellow dress with long hair, smiling faintly for a camera. She's coming home, they say. But no one knows when.

Mommy is Marie Michou Daniel, deported this year for disobeying a judge's order to return to Haiti, her native country, which she fled nine years ago. Her children are American citizens simply because they were born on American soil. They are unaware that their mother, because she was born on Haitian soil, is no longer here.

"They used to cry a lot. So I told them she had an accident and is in the hospital," said their grandmother, Roselene Massolas, a legal citizen because of a political twist of fate. She is living in her daughter's West Palm Beach home. "If they know she's at the hospital, the hospital is in the United States. If they think she's in Haiti, it is too far away."

Daniel was one of 153,026 people that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deported between October 2005 and July. Of those, 3,572 were from Florida. Her children ? twin sons Marvin and Garvin and daughter Cherby ? are among the estimated 3 million children of undocumented parents who are U.S.-born citizens, according to the Washington-based Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization.

And these children, who daily face the prospect that their parents suddenly will be swept away, are some of the more emotional threads that weave the fabric of the nationwide immigration debate.

Their grandmother cannot read; and does not speak English; nor does she drive. And though she's lived here for 11 years, she does not know how to do the simple things expected from American mothers: teaching the boys to count to 20 in English, celebrating their birthdays, managing when they're sick.

The Immigration Advocacy Center in Miami learns of families such as Daniel's frequently, executive director Cheryl Little said.

"We're seeing parents separated from their children on a regular basis," Little said. "Families are faced with having to make a difficult decision: Do they uproot their children and take them where they may not be safe, or do they leave them in the United States? These are heartbreaking decisions to make."

Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Greenacres is helping Massolas raise the children the way her daughter did before she was arrested in January. Members of the congregation help pay the family's bills, take the children on outings and deliver boxes filled with American food that Massolas is learning to cook. They also teach the children how to speak Creole because, until now, English has been their language of choice.

Tears streamed down Massolas' face one evening this month as she spoke remorsefully of these things. She tried to wipe away each drop for fear the children would see, but her tears fell much too quickly, just the way her daughter left.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with them. I'm not part of the culture," said Massolas, 44. "Every day they ask, 'When will my mother be home?' "

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The Rev. Pierre Gregoire Saint-Louis of Sinai Missionary plucked a phone card from a plastic bag and dialed one of the many phone numbers that Daniel has left with her mother.

"Hello?" the pastor said. "Marie Michou Daniel?"

This is how her family contacts her now. The church donates phone cards so Massolas can call at least once a week. They have about 20 minutes to pack in as much conversation as possible, trying to avoid the tears and the heartache so Daniel can hear how her children are growing without her.

Marvin and Garvin have lost baby teeth, three from one, four from the other. Cherby is getting too big for her grandma to carry. She needs new clothes. The 5-year-old boys want help with their homework. They're already talking about Christmas and decorating a tree.

Sometimes, the children grab the phone from their grandmother, pressing it tight to their ears like they are hugging their mother.

"Mommy? I love you," Marvin said in his squeaky voice, pacing the living room floor like a grown-up on a business call. "How are you? Are they giving you a shot? Let me go with you. ... I love you."

Conversations like this make Massolas' head spin. But phone calls like the next one scare her even more.

From a friend's phone in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Daniel's voice trembles this night. She's quick to talk of the murder she witnessed in 1997. A man held a gun to her neighbor's head and shot three times. Daniel began receiving death threats. So she fled the country of an estimated 8 million, where the uneducated and the poor outnumber the professionals and the rich.

Daniel came to the United States in 1997 with a photo-switch passport and was arrested as soon as she tried to make it through customs at Miami International Airport. She was paroled after stating that she had fled Haiti because she feared for her life. She filed paperwork for political asylum, obtained a work permit and started to work odd jobs in Palm Beach County.

She became a certified nursing assistant, eventually had her twins and then her daughter. She saved enough money to buy a house and filled it with furniture and a family she had always wanted ? all the while, not knowing how long she could stay.

"I didn't want to return to Haiti because of the political turmoil and because I'm a single mother," Daniel, 30, said on the phone that night. "I was very scared."

When her political asylum was denied in 1999, she appealed. And when she learned the appeal, too, was denied, she made a decision to remain in the United States anyway. By then, she'd had her children and was afraid to take them to a country where kidnappings are common and violence is the norm.

But on Jan. 30, Daniel's happy, hopeful American life abruptly came to an end when she got into a minor car accident on U.S. 441 in suburban West Palm Beach. She had just dropped the twins off at school and her daughter at day care. Before they said goodbye, Cherby asked her mother what she was going to do. Daniel said she was going to work and planned to buy groceries to try a new recipe for dinner.

The police officer at the accident noticed there was a lien on Daniel's driver license. She was taken into custody and sent to Krome Detention Center near Miami, where she was imprisoned for almost a month until a guard woke her at 3 one morning. He told her to gather her belongings because she was going home. Daniel, at first, was excited.

But "home" meant Haiti.

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"We were devastated by this," said attorney Mark Citrin of Citrin and Goldstein, the Miami firm that handled Daniel's case. Citrin has practiced immigration law for 19 years. "We expected an officer to be sympathetic. We were dumbfounded the government could be that cold."

Paul Goldstein expected Daniel to remain in the United States under supervision, where she would be required to meet with immigration officers frequently. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security immediately denied the request to stay because she did not have a passport. Goldstein rebutted, explaining why there wasn't one.

A few weeks passed before Goldstein received a phone call from a friend of Daniel's informing him she was gone.

"We basically said, 'Sending this lady back could be a death sentence,' " Goldstein said. "Your heart goes out to somebody like that. The children basically became orphans."

Children or not, parent or not ? that does no't matter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Anyone who violates the law, regardless of their circumstances, will face the consequences.

"It's really unfortunate the parents put their children in that situation by breaking the law," said Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman in Miami. "Someone who is ordered removed ... our obligation as a law enforcement agency is to enforce that order."

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said parents who break immigration laws deserve no sympathy.

"In any other situation in which a parent violates the law and the children suffer as a result, we hold the parents responsible," Mehlman said.

He said FAIR, a national nonprofit organization that advocates tougher immigration laws, questions the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that allows automatic citizenship to children born in the United States. FAIR does not believe citizenship should be granted to the children of illegal parents.

"There have been bills floating around Congress that would change the interpretation," Mehlman said. "We are certainly in favor of that."

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Daniel is living among friends in Haiti's capital. Like many Haitians denied political asylum who are forced to return, she does not stay in one place long because she's afraid that those who once threatened her will come for her.

Work is scarce in Haiti, so Daniel does not have a job. She has few belongings, just what her mother and church have mailed in the past seven months. That includes snapshots of her boys on their first day of kindergarten and the preschool graduation she regretfully missed. The twins saved the red caps and gowns they wore that day for their mother to see. Just as they've saved the seven baby teeth.

"There's no peace for me right now," Daniel said in the phone call. "The children ask when I'm coming back. They say, 'Mommy, you've left us.' I keep lying to them. I know I'm lying to them. I say I'm coming back. I have hope that I will. But I don't know how it's going to happen."

Massolas sat near the pastor and listened carefully to her daughter as the tears continued to fall. Daniel told the pastor that while traveling outside Port-au-Prince this month, her bus was hijacked by men with machine guns. No one was hurt. She was fine. But that may not be the case next time.

The pastor suddenly told Daniel they must say goodbye. Their minutes were up.

Massolas buried her head in her hands, while the children, so lighthearted, so innocent, tried their best to console her.

"It's OK, it's OK," said Garvin, stroking her hair gently with his tiny right hand. "She's coming home soon."

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Massolas fled to the United States in 1995 for political reasons, and she became a legal resident after President Clinton signed the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act in 1998. The law enabled many Haitians who had fled to America before 1996 to apply for lawful permanent resident status without first having to apply for an immigrant visa.

Because Haiti is politically unstable, Haitian communities and activists in the United States repeatedly have demanded that the government grant Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. TPS has been granted to refugees from war-torn countries, including Somalia, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Sudan. It never has been granted to Haitians, even during the ravaging floods and mudslides unleashed by Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004 that killed more than 3,000 people in the city of Gonaives.

The Immigration Advocacy Center has written numerous letters to government officials requesting TPS for Haitians. Even Gerard Latortue, a Boca Raton retiree, sent a letter of support while serving as Haiti's interim prime minister.

"Haitians don't have political clout that other immigrant groups do," Little said. "This administration knows full well they can discriminate against the Haitians and not many people are going to care."

The pastor said family and friends plan to seek legal action to see whether Daniel can return on humanitarian parole, usually granted to people with special circumstances, such as the severely ill who need medical attention abroad.

But attorneys Citrin and Goldstein said it's doubtful that would work.

Daniel is banned from the United States for 10 years because she was ordered to leave. When the children turn 21, they can petition for her to return, but because she committed immigration fraud when she used the photo-switch passport, she would need a waiver for the fraud.

"We've had three from Haiti just like this," Citrin said. "Nobody wants to give Haitians TPS."

Saint-Louis has sent letters to local congressmen pleading for help. He plans to visit Daniel during a trip to Haiti this month.

"We are Christians, and we are immigrants," he said of his congregation. "We understand. People, when they are facing safety problems in their country, they have a great perception of America as the land of freedom. You have to bring some hope for these people. That's all you can count on: prayer and hope."

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12,675: Number of Haitians who were denied political asylum from 2000 to 2005, according to TRAC, a data-gathering research and distribution organization associated with Syracuse University.7,009: Number of Haitians who were granted political asylum from 2003 to 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics.

7,009: Number of Haitians who were granted political asylum from 2003 to 2005, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics.