Refugee Cutbacks Could Isolate Rohingya Children in the U.S. – The New York Times

ELK RAPIDS, Mich. Not long after Hefzur Rahman enrolled at his new school in Michigan three years ago, his fifth-grade class studied the subhuman conditions that enslaved Africans endured in overcrowded ships bound for North America.

He knew what it was like to be on a boat in fear for his life, he told his classmates.

At the age of 11, he had joined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fleeing violent oppression in Myanmar, cramming onto boats piloted by smugglers. The men beat their human cargo, he recalled, and he watched desperate people drink seawater only to die of dehydration. As his boat began to sink, Hefzur tied empty water bottles around his waist and jumped into the ocean. I thought I would pass away, he said.

Today, Hefzur is safe, living with a foster family in small-town Michigan, where most of the boats that ply nearby Elk Lake are filled with families headed for sunny afternoons on the water.

But he stays up at night worrying about his parents, who put him on the boat leaving Myanmar not just to save his life, but also in the hope that he would help get the rest of the family out. They are still counting on him. I feel like I am in jail, he told his foster mother, anxious that he was spending too much time at school. I want to work. I must send money to my family.

About 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar in the summer of 2017, and almost all of them, like Hefzurs parents, are living in camps in neighboring Bangladesh. A few thousand have been admitted to the United States part of a dwindling number of refugees granted resettlement under a program that President Trump has been scaling back and is expected to slash again this week.

Intent on curbing immigration, the Trump administration will admit no more than 30,000 refugees this fiscal year, the lowest number since the programs inception in 1980. In the coming days, Mr. Trump is likely to announce another reduction for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, perhaps setting a cap as low as 10,000 refugees or suspending admissions entirely.

For much of the past century, the United States was a world leader in refugee resettlement. The government admitted hundreds of thousands of displaced people after World War II and enacted its first refugee legislation in 1948. It later took in large numbers of refugees from Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union and Cuba, and in more recent years, accepted those fleeing war and genocide in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Adopting even lower limits on refugees would be the latest move by the president to restrict immigration at a time when the countrys proportion of foreign-born residents has reached its highest level in nearly a century. On the southwestern border, the administration has also imposed strict new limits on asylum seekers, mainly from Central America, who are fleeing violence in their homelands.

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, have faced systemic repression in the majority-Buddhist country for decades. But in August 2017 the military and allied mobs began burning entire villages. The violence, which the United Nations described as ethnic cleansing, pushed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya out of the country.

In 2015, 4,071 Rohingya refugees were admitted to the United States. About 3,000 arrived the following year. But far fewer have come since President Trump took office, and as of Friday, 593 Rohingya had been admitted this year.

For the dozens of children like Hefzur who have been arriving from Myanmar without family, an initial expectation that their parents would join them has faded, leaving many of them frustrated and distraught.

My dream is to bring my family here, Hefzur said. Im afraid my mom and dad will die before I can touch them again.

Bruce Mossburg, program director for refugee foster care at Bethany Christian Services, which has sponsored many of the Rohingya in Michigan, says the children his agency works with often appear to struggle with survivors guilt.

Its hard for them to heal and move forward if their families are in crisis and they do not know if they will ever see them again, he said. Cutting the numbers is devastating for them.

In Michigan, the Rohingya community is centered in the city of Grand Rapids, where they have formed a soccer club, attend mosque together and share the latest news about developments affecting their families left behind.

Rohim Mohammod, a teenager who was resettled in Grand Rapids in 2017, mastered English within a year of arriving and has received invitations to speak on panels about the refugee experience. In May, he won his sophomore classs Champion of Character which he hung in the bedroom of the neat, two-story Craftsman house where he lives with an American family.

But like Hefzur, he often talks about his mother and two younger brothers who are trapped in Myanmar. Rohim, 17, recently got a job at a hospital cafeteria, and is sending as much money as he can to his family.

He was basically the man of the house, Tori McGarvey, Rohims case manager, said. His younger brothers looked up to him. His mother counted on him.

Deprived of an education as a Rohingya in Myanmar, Rohim has relished school, devoting long hours to improving his math skills. Having never heard of the Holocaust, he devoured Night, Elie Wiesels memoir of his childhood experiences in death camps.

I look forward to graduating from high school, going to college, Rohim said. I always wanted to start a new life. I want to have a good job, a house, find someone who I love one day.

But even more, he said, I would like to bring my brothers over here.

In Myanmar, parents who feared for their childrens safety paid to smuggle them to Malaysia, a majority-Muslim country. Instead they ended up in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, rescued from boats that were adrift in the high seas. After languishing in detention centers or camps for more than a year, the stateless minors were granted refugee status by the United Nations and flown to the United States.

I never heard of United States, said Hefzur, sitting on the edge of the lake at his foster familys vacation home.

His paperwork said he was 12, and he looked that age, said Karen Grettenberger, his foster mother. The family enrolled him in fifth grade, and for the first few months, he was quiet and polite.

Gradually, though, he started to withdraw. When Ms. Grettenberger began taking Hefzur to therapy, thats when we realized that we had an angry kid, she recalled.

His responses were so vehement the interpreter apologized before translating, she said. Later, at home, He sat on the floor and refused to look at me while he played with miniature superheroes. He pulled his legs to his chest and rocked. He directed his anger at us for keeping him captive, which hurt.

Hefzur wanted to quit school and get a full-time job to send money to his family, frustrated that his age which had been roughly calculated when he arrived because most Rohingya do not keep records of birth dates rendered him too young to legally work. You need to change my age, he told his foster mother.

The Grettenbergers asked Bethany Christian Services to arrange a bone-density test, which estimated he was 14 old enough to work.

He took a job stocking shelves at a grocery store for minimum wage, and mowed lawns and moved dirt for neighbors. He sent almost all he earned to Myanmar, and his family used it for food and medicine, he said.

Hefzur stayed in touch with his parents via cellphone. They struggled to envision his new life, and were displeased that their son was living with non-Muslims.

Through an interpreter, the Grettenbergers told them that they had no intention of converting him even though Lou Grettenberger, a United Methodist pastor, had been taking Hefzur to church on Sundays with the rest of his family.

The Grettenbergers also ordered decals of Quran passages one reads Praise be to God for Hefzurs room. They bought him a new prayer book, which he placed on a bookcase beside his prayer rug. On Fridays, they drove him to the mosque for prayers.

While Hefzur was adjusting, conditions for the Rohingya in Myanmar, where his family was still living, were deteriorating. His parents described villages burning in the distance. They had to go, they informed him.

They told him they had collected money from his brother in Malaysia and sold a married sisters gold earrings to pay for safe passage to Bangladesh. Then the phone calls stopped.

For seven days Hefzur had no idea what happened to them.

I remember awakening and hearing him singing his prayers, Ms. Grettenberger said.

She and her husband felt helpless. It was an exceptionally surreal situation where we watched the genocide unfold in the media, she said, and our son was getting updates from his relatives, hiding in their homes and by the river, describing the same burning villages we were watching on TV.

When Hefzur finally learned that his family had made it to Bangladesh, he was overjoyed.

Gradually, Hefzur began settling into school, and feeling less guilty about the time he spent there. When he was in 10th grade, Ms. Grettenberger was approached by his teachers. They ganged up on me and said, Your child needs to be wrestling, she recalled.

Once he became a powerful member of the varsity team, he started getting high-fives in the hallways. While his English was still halting and academics did not excite him, Hefzurs other talents were becoming evident.

When the Grettenbergers bought a trampoline, Hefzur assembled it by studying the picture. He built a playhouse from an elaborate kit without reading instructions, repaired the motorboat and tractor, and created a pulley system to reach the bird feeders above the deck.

Gradually, Ms. Grettenberger said, his anxiety seemed to subside.

It took time for him to see us as allies, she said. Eventually, he put the anger aside and embraced what help we are able to give.

Denied citizenship in their homeland, the Rohingya children, like other legal residents of the United States, can become naturalized Americans after five years. When they become adults, they can apply for their parents to join them through a process known as family reunification, which Mr. Trump has said he wants to cut back.

Hefzur has begun to make plans. This semester, he started a vocational program that would enable him to graduate with a certificate in plumbing. He hopes to take a driving test soon.

Ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha last month, Hefzur sent his family money to buy a cow for slaughter. I will keep helping them, he said, but I also used some of my money to buy a computer. After setting it up, he made a 3-D sketch of the Grettenberger house and insisted they hang it on the wall.

When people asked me how I am when I first came, I could only say, Fine. But I really didnt know what it meant, he said on a Saturday afternoon when he could enjoy his new hobby, sailing, after a week of hard work. Now I really am fine and I want my family to be fine, too.

He hoisted the sail on his foster familys sunfish boat and set out across Elk Lake, its waters, as they nearly always are this time of year, placid.

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Refugee Cutbacks Could Isolate Rohingya Children in the U.S. - The New York Times