Boy, 6, runs into mom’s arms after resettlement delays
Son had lived away from his family for three years.
Amina Ibrahim nearly set off an alarm running through airport security after spotting her young son down a long hallway. When a federal Transportation Security Administration agent stopped her, she settled for blowing the boy kisses before he ran into her arms.
Six-year-old Mohammed Bare arrived at John Glenn Columbus International Airport shortly before 11:30 p.m. Thursday. As soon as he saw his mother and one of his sisters, he ran toward them, yelling “mama.”
The reunion was a long time coming, with Mohammed having lived half a world away from his family — first in Uganda, then Kenya — for the past three years while they’ve been in Columbus.
The two were separated in Africa when Mohammed’s father took him on a trip while she was pregnant and didn’t bring the boy back to her as promised. She came to the United States in May 2015, and for the longest time, Ibrahim thought her son would never join her and his three sisters — 2-year-old Mishtaq, 5-year-old Mumtaz and 18-year-old Faiza — in America.
Refugees come to the country legally after a lengthy screening process by the U.S. government, fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Ibrahim and her family are among about 40,000 Somali refugees living in Columbus.
“I was thinking I’d become an American citizen and go join him” in Africa, Ibrahim said in Somali through a translator in August. She would have had to wait 11 months at that point before becoming eligible for citizenship.
Although Mohammed finally stepped onto American soil last week, the journey wasn’t easy, for him or his mother.
On May 6, 2015, the day after Ibrahim was resettled in Columbus, she went knocking on the door of Community Refugee and Immigration Services, wanting to know how fast her son could join them.
Angie Plummer, executive director of CRIS, one of two refugee-resettlement agencies in Columbus, worked with Ibrahim, trying to get the vetting process completed for Mohammed. That was before President Donald Trump’s first executive order banning people from several majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, came down on Jan. 27, 2017. It gave Ibrahim even less hope of bringing her son into the United States than she had in 2015.
The day before Trump signed the order, Ibrahim was at a news conference at the Columbus office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, crying as she held a photo of then-4year-old Mohammed, who was stuck in Kenya.
Mohammed was born in Uganda, but because his parents were born in Somalia, he was considered a Somali national and, therefore, was banned from entering the United States under Trump’s order.
Ibrahim went to Kenya with Mumtaz and Mishtaq to see Mohammed in July 2017, risking her legal status in the United States, after more than two years of separation. She had to come back to the U.S. or risk losing her green card in January.
The 38-year-old Northwest Side resident is no stranger to being separated from her family. She was torn from her parents at a young age when civil war broke out in Somalia. Her brother and father died, and her remaining siblings fled for safety. She doesn’t know where they are.
For more than 20 years, Ibrahim lived in a refugee camp in Uganda, where she gave birth to Mohammed. She was pregnant again when his father took the boy to see relatives and didn’t bring him back.
By the time mother and son were reunited, travel plans for Ibrahim and her daughters to the United States were pending, and many people urged her not to try to add Mohammed to the plans because it could put the whole process in jeopardy. She was told she’d be reunited with him within six months.
Now, after enduring more than three years of separation from her son, she would recommend that other mothers never do what she did in 2015.
“Stay with your child, even if you have to starve,” Ibrahim said.
On Thursday, she arrived at the Columbus airport with three balloons, a bouquet of silk flowers and a wide smile. She left with Mumtaz and Mohammed by her side, the two siblings playing together, gazing in wonder out a shaded window that overlooked airport escalators as the adults figured out parking.
They went home to where toys, gifts and a bed had been waiting for Mohammed’s arrival for weeks.
“Praise to God that I have a beautiful life,” Ibrahim said.