On June 12, I walked across the Peace Bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario with my client Mariama, a 32-year-old asylum-seeking Guinean mother, her 2-year-old daughter and her 8-month-old son, an American citizen.
Moments later, Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers escorted a slim, well-dressed man holding a little boy’s hand. My client turned, saw him, and fell into his arms: it was her husband Mamadou — the children’s father — and her 5-year-old stepson. She hadn’t seen either in eight months, Mamadou was meeting his baby for the first time.
All seemed as it should be. But it wasn’t.
Mamadou’s 11- and eight-year-old sons were detained hours away in a Bronx congregate care facility by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which refused to release them to join their family at the border interview we had scheduled. ORR’s intransigence showcased this administration’s senseless hostility to family unity, in stark contrast to Canada’s continuing commitment to it.
This surreal reverse flight from the United States to Canada (a bizarro version of my Holocaust-survivor grandparents’ journey from a German displaced persons camp to Ellis Island) began when Mariama arrived at JFK in October 2025, very pregnant, with her young daughter and her stepsons. Fleeing persecution in Guinea, she traveled ahead of Mamadou, who planned to follow a week later.
Mariama, whose first language is Fulani, explained in grade-school French that she was seeking asylum. CBP officers cancelled her visitor’s visa and placed her in expedited removal. Despite a 2021 Department of Homeland Security directive that pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women should not be detained except in very limited circumstances, CBP held the visibly pregnant Mariama and her family in airport secondary detention for a week.
Mariama slept with the children on a couch in a cold waiting room. An officer escorted them to a crowded public bathroom, and she could not bathe. Officials then deemed her stepsons unaccompanied children and placed them in ORR custody — unmoved by her signed, notarized guardianship agreement and by the family’s terror and tears.
Mariama underwent a credible fear interview without an attorney, with a French, not Fulani interpreter, her fear spurring preterm labor. Five days after her arrival, CBP brought Mariama under guard to Jamaica Hospital, where she delivered her son early. When the hospital contacted NYC Administration for Children’s Services for respite foster care for her daughter, a colleague there alerted me, and I filed an emergency habeas petition in federal court.
A judge ordered Mariama’s release; she and her babies moved into a family shelter. But the next eight months brought uncertainty, fear, and isolation. Mamadou’s U.S. visa had been cancelled, leaving him no legal way to join them. Mariama could not safely return to Guinea, but nor could she find sanctuary here, when the government treated her like a criminal and tore her stepsons away.
Mariama immediately applied to sponsor her stepsons, but ORR officials rejected her application. They acknowledged she was the boys’ stepmother but said she lacked the correct documents and provided no further assistance.
Under the 2008 William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, ORR must promptly place unaccompanied children in the least restrictive setting in their best interest, usually by releasing them to sponsors. Yet ORR never identified an alternate plan. Alone, the boys languished, attending multiple deportation hearings.
Suddenly, in May, ORR solicited a new sponsorship application from Mariama. The timing was notable: Mamadou had just reached Canada and filed a refugee application. Under the family exception to Canada’s safe third country rule, relatives can join a refugee applicant’s claim. There was now a path to reunification — in Canada. But ORR told the boys’ attorney it would not release them to Canada.
Mamadou’s Canadian attorney scheduled a June 12 border interview for all five family members in the U.S. The boys’ attorney and I appealed to ORR leadership. We spoke with the Canadian consulate and the family’s deportation officers, who supported release. A member of Congress advocated zealously for the boys, their constituents.
ORR leadership exuded grave concern, calling it irresponsible to “suddenly” release the boys to their DNA-confirmed biological father. But they couldn’t articulate why detaining children in the U.S., away from family, served their best interest more than reuniting them in a country willing to hear their refugee claim. ORR showed no appetite for contacting Canadian officials to problem-solve. Their position was puzzling not only in its cruelty but in its illogic. Wasn’t this administration doing everything possible to purge the U.S. of non-citizens?
On June 12, Mariama and Mamadou held hands in Fort Erie’s Peace Bridge Newcomer Centre, a brightly lit, family-friendly space connected to CBSA’s offices, watching their daughter in the play kitchen while their son burbled in his father’s arms. I kept expecting the stepsons to magically appear. They never did.
Later that weekend, Mamadou called me. At 3 a.m. the morning after the interview, ORR staff shook the boys awake, drove them to Canada, and left them at the CBSA office, without alerting their attorney or parents. The agency that purported to care about unaccompanied children fought an orderly and humane reunion, then essentially dumped an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old, without a caregiver, at another country’s doorstep.
Family separation causes documented, lasting psychological harm to children while offering no public benefit.
But we don’t need to be scientists to feel a separated parent’s pain. Another client recently had a panic attack in my office, clawing at me and crying that she’d sooner die than be deported and ripped from her daughter. Mariama’s story is not isolated: turbocharged detentions and deportations separate parents from children every day. This incomprehensible institutional cruelty can only weaken what is great about the U.S.
When Mamadou and Mariama send me photos now of their family of seven posing exultantly beside Canadian monuments, I am reminded of individual human resilience. I’m not sure our collective humanity, here in the United States, is as resilient.
Schonfeld is attorney-in-charge, immigration for the Center for Family Representation.