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Groton Daily Independent
Monday, July 31, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 031 ~ 35 of 42
are living on their own in countries of temporary refuge, in limbo while their U.S. foster parents hope for a court ruling that will allow the children to nish their journeys.
Since the June day a refugee agency matched the Rooneys with their foster son, which turned out to be the same day of the rst Supreme Court ruling barring him, “we have experienced this very unexpected ride of grief in our family,” says Rooney, a 39-year- old family therapist and mother of two from Brighton, a suburb of Detroit.
Meanwhile, the boy who ed his home country at 13 to avoid wide- spread forced military conscription of children continues to fend for himself on the streets in his temporary refuge in another African capital, with no phone or internet for the Rooneys to reach him to explain the delay.
“There’s part of me that really hopesheknowsafamilywantshim,” Tianna Rooney says.
Since the 1980s, the program for orphaned refugee children has brought in more than 6,000 refugee children, including 203 last year.
In this July 14, 2017 photo, Julie Rajagopal, facing, hugs her 16-year-old foster child from Eritrea after posing for photos at Dolores Park in San Francisco. When he landed in March, he was among the last refugee foster children to make it into the U.S. Trump administration travel bans declaredtoblockterroristsalsoarehaltingasmall,three- decade-old program bringing orphan refugee children to waiting foster families in the United States. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
“These are kids on their own, and struggling to survive,” said Elizabeth Foydel, policy counsel with the International Refugee Assistance Project, a Washington, D.C., legal-aid group for refugees.
“How long do you feel comfortable with your child not having a caregiver?” Foydel says she asks other Americans. “Trying to manage for themselves?”
The program for orphaned refugee children from around the world is different from one started by the Obama administration in 2014 for Central American children eeing a surge in violence there.
In the program for unaccompanied refugee children, kids eking out a living by themselves in a refugee camp or elsewhere must rst come to the attention of a U.N. agency, which may choose to refer them for the U.S foster program, especially if the children are deemed to be particularly vulnerable wherever they are now. The children must then pass U.S. security screenings and other requirements, and win a match with an American foster family or group home.
But a series of Trump administration orders, and court rulings interpreting them, are now barring refugees with no close family in the United States. That requirement shuts out the refugee children in the foster program, who have no relatives they can turn to anywhere.
The child refugees newly blocked from waiting American foster families include ve Ethiopian sisters, ages 9 to 16. The girls lost both parents in 2009, and have faced abuse alone in the war zone of neighboring South Sudan and in Sudanese cities, said Jessica Jones, policy counsel for the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Along with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Lutherans are one of two U.S. groups running the program on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
Other waiting children include a 17-year-old couple originally from the Asian country of Myanmar and