February 14, 2023 - bROKEN HEARTS IN bARRON, wI
At least 20 families in the rural community of Barron, Wisconsin, are still waiting for immediate family members to arrive as refugees on visa petitions and affidavits of relationship, most filed before 2016. This includes a number of families* who are waiting for their children — some now young adults, some still minors, and all separated by visa processing taking so far seven years or longer. These separations continue with no projected timelines, aside from a few promised arrival dates that came and went without either visas or explanation.
Meanwhile, the separated American family members continue to work long hours in demanding jobs to support both their families here and overseas, sending money for education, food, and housing as the sole support of those still waiting. The trauma of extended separation is evident in more than their physical exhaustion. Often separated parents report being asked by their children, “Why have you abandoned us?”
But these parents did not willingly abandon their children.** As one grieving mother explains, “I either came here without my sons, or stayed and watched them sell khat [a stimulant drug that is legal in some East African nations] on the street corner for lack of education or any other options to survive.” Other families are separated by war, by the destruction of homes and the death or disappearance of family members. It is instead our nation’s immigration system that has abandoned these families.***
The announcement by the U.S. State Department last month of the Welcome Corps program, in which Private Sponsorship Groups agree to sponsor refugees independently of the traditional refugee resettlement agencies, is a step forward, but is not yet an answer to the ongoing trauma experienced by the separated Somali-American families of Barron. While acknowledging the many years of waiting endured by refugees in Sub-Saharan Africa, the program was launched without the option of identifying specific refugees to sponsor.
As we say often in this politically conservative area, one doesn’t have to believe in the rightness of the refugee resettlement program generally to recognize the wrong committed against families who trusted the system that had operated for decades and the NGO staff that implemented it. Over and over, parents agreeing to resettlement without their children were told – were promised – by resettlement staff that their children would be able to join them in six months to a year; in a few cases, two years’ separation was given as a worst-case scenario. Yet these same parents are now left without their children, and without any assured means of reunion short of leaving the country that is now their home and to which they entrusted their families’ future while contributing to our community’s well-being. This powerlessness of separated Somali-American families remains despite the fact that, with rare exception, the parents and other petitioners living in Barron are now US citizens and have pursued every known Congressional and legal advocacy option, at great expense of effort, time, and money.
As their wait goes on, we as friends and neighbors ask: “Why are these families still separated? And why do those with the power to reunite them seem to think that is okay?” Share some love this February… contact the White House and tell them: it’s not. The Somali-American and other refugee families who have been waiting years for their children, spouses, and parents need reunion now.
-Immigrant Advocates of Barron County, Wisconsin
*Families with parents and children living across the world from each other face enormous stress beyond just the loss of family life and mutual caregiving. Medical, employment, and education options are severely limited for refugees in places like Uganda and Kenya, and neither venturing out on the streets nor staying at home is safe due to the potential for arbitrary detention by the police and for violent home invasion and robbery. There are at least three families with Barron connections in which teenaged minors have been left alone or with younger siblings to look after for years after the deaths or departures of other family members, their American parents reduced to long-distance support and supervision, and these situations not leading to any faster processing despite being known to resettlement staff and US officials.
**There are a number of ways that families are separated by the resettlement process and realities of refugee life, and reasons why loving parents may choose to temporarily leave children behind when the other choices available are worse. Reasons to separate include faster processing for smaller family groups and the dangerous and impoverished daily life of both refugee camps and the travel to get to them.
***The current administration has so far failed to follow-through on campaign promises to prioritize the resumption of refugee visa processing, especially for those who were in the refugee resettlement system before the previous administration so completely dismantled it as part of their own campaign pledge to end “chain migration” and prevent Muslim immigration to the U.S. Yes, Covid-19 disrupted everything, and the unanticipated arrival of thousands of Afghan asylum-seekers has necessarily strained a resettlement and support system that had been greatly diminished in recent years. But last year’s initiatives for sponsorship of Ukrainians fleeing war and Venezuelans fleeing economic collapse show that both action and innovation are possible—but were just not being applied to this particular refugee community, and still are not being applied to these particular suffering families and others like them throughout our nation.
