Desperate for reunion
NEW YORK/KAMPALA - Somali refugee Ramlo Ali Noor will never reunite with her 16-year-old son in her new home in Columbus, Ohio.
She had been waiting since applying to the US government in 2015 to bring over her three boys from Uganda, but their cases faced hold-ups in refugee processing under the Trump administration.
On September 22, the youngest of the three teenagers — Abdiaziz — died suddenly from a brain infection. Now Ms Noor, 37, fears the window for her two surviving sons to make it into the United States is shrinking.
The US government plans to slash the refugee ceiling to 18,000, its lowest since the modern refugee program began in 1980. More than half the places for refugees in the 2020 fiscal year are reserved for Iraqis, Central Americans and religious minorities, leaving only 7500 for everyone else, according to a White House proposal. President Donald Trump has yet to finalise the refugee number for next year.
At the same time — as of this summer — nearly 30,000 refugees had passed resettlement interviews abroad with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Of those, more than 8800 had been approved for travel, according to a July 2, 2019 State Department report seen by Reuters.
Ms Noor’s sons are from a previous marriage and their father is not involved in their lives. She has been separated from them since 2010 when she left strife-torn Somalia for Malaysia, where she could apply for resettlement as a refugee with the United Nations.
The United Nations refers most refugee cases to the United States and other countries around the world for resettlement, but that route to the United States could become more difficult under the new ceiling according to a presidential document seen by Reuters.
Ms Noor could only afford to travel alone, so left her children with two of their aunts in the hopes of reuniting when she found a new home. Soon after Ms Noor left, one of the aunts was killed and the other injured in a militant attack on a village south of Mogadishu, the boys said in an interview with Reuters and Ms Noor swore in an affidavit to the US government.
Once she was resettled in Ohio in 2015, she applied for her sons to join her. With a job as a home health aide, she was able to pay for them to move to Kampala, Uganda. But since passing a DNA test in 2016 to prove they were her sons, their cases have been stuck.