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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

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.