Trump travel ban keeps orphan children from US foster families

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

Tianna Rooney has already bought the poster board for the sign she’ll wave when the 16-year-old refugee boy her family is taking in arrives in the United States. Rooney knows the exact words of welcome she’ll write on it, in the teenager’s native language from the African country of Eritrea.

But Rooney’s family is leaving the sign blank, for now. She and her husband, Todd, fear actually writing the words “Welcome Home” could break her heart.

The foster son they’re waiting for is part of a small, three-decade-old U.S. program for so-called unaccompanied refugee minors that has been halted by a series of new refugee bans and travel limits imposed by the Trump administration in the name of fighting terrorism.

By blocking the program, the U.S. travel bans have stranded more than 100 refugee children who were already matched to waiting American foster families. Without parents or other adult relatives, those kids 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 finish 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 first 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 fled his home country at 13 to avoid widespread 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 hopes he knows a family wants him,” 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.

“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.

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 fleeing a surge in violence there.