Travel ban keeps orphan kids from U.S. families

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, threedecade-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.

Since the 1980s, the program for orphaned refugee children has brought in more than 6,000 refugee children, including 203 last year.

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 five 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.

Tianna Rooney recently got out the poster board, thinking to work on the welcome sign. After a concerned look from her husband, she put it away.

“We want to think positive thoughts” that their foster son will come safely, Todd Rooney said. “But without endangering ourselves. Without setting ourselves up for a heartache.”