See story below.
Game plan for asylum-seekers who want to move around the world? when you make a refugee claim in the US and you do not like the result, get into a trunk, avoid detection, and have the taxpayers pay for your costs, hearings, etc. while you try to dramatize your case in the media to garner sympathy? Not unusual....unfortunately.
Lesson: reform the system now! Enter surreptitiously and and be automatically detained and denied access to the system, welfare, legal aid, etc. the system should only be available to those who present themselves upfront and do not play games. Asylum shoppers need not enjoy our support, those who are in refugee camps and have no means to escape should receive our attention, not those who "shop" for a country around the world to get into surreptitiously. And prosecute the facilitators who transport people! People-smuggling endangers our national security. There should be zero tolerance.
Asylum shoppers who hire smugglers and willingly break the law are insulting legitimate refugees who live in fear in dangerous places, and patiently wait in line for an opportunity to be resettled.
Refugee claimant left baby in U.S.
Refugee claimant left baby in U.S.
By Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen
April 13, 2011
Floresha Yucel is heartbroken and desperate, but realizes she “can only take one step at a time” in the hope of being reunited with her family, including her baby boy.
Yucel, 33, arrived in Ottawa on March 27, after being smuggled into Canada, from Detroit to Windsor, in the trunk of a car. She is staying at her sister’s downtown apartment.
Yucel had travelled by bus overnight to Detroit from New Windsor, a town in southeast New York, where she lived. She was fleeing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which she says advised her weeks earlier that she faced deportation to her native Albania. She was ordered to attend a hearing in Manhattan on March 17.
Yucel says she spent a decade in the United States. Her Ottawa immigration lawyer, Rezaur Rahman, says it appears she was told she had to leave after her application for refugee status was finally rejected. Yucel says she was given a social-security number when she arrived in the U.S., which allowed her to work. She says she had various jobs, often holding down two at a time and working seven days a week.
When she got on the Detroit-bound bus on March 26, she left behind her husband, Muiat Yucel, whom she married three years ago, their seven-month-old baby, Kubilay, who is an American citizen, and another son, 18, and daughter, 16. The latter are from a previous marriage and were born in Greece.
Yucel says the only person who knew she was coming to Ottawa was another sister, who lives near New Windsor and is taking care of her three children. Her Ottawa sister only found out when Yucel called her from Toronto. Muiat was left in the dark, too.
Yucel’s first priority was to apply for refugee status. The next was to get her husband to drive from New Windsor to Ottawa to drop off the infant, whom she was breastfeeding. There were two attempts to bring Kubilay here — the first on April 2 by his father, and another on April 9, by Yucel’s sister from New York. Canadian border guards at the Thousand Islands crossing refused entry both times.
In the most recent attempt, Yucel waited on the Canadian side for her sister to arrive with the baby. She was devastated when she realized the rendezvous would not take place. “I miss my baby so much,” she says. “My baby needs me. I need my baby.”
Yucel insists she didn’t make any prior arrangements to be smuggled into Canada. But after she broke down in a Detroit cab and the driver listened to her story, he told her “he would see what he could do.” A couple of hours later, the cabbie arrived with two men who told Yucel that for $3,500, they could take her to the Greyhound station in Windsor. “I was very scared,” says Yucel, but within minutes, she was in the trunk of a car. A few hours later, she was on a bus to Toronto. From there, she boarded another bus for Ottawa.
On Thursday, Yucel will be interviewed by Canadian immigration officials to determine whether she is eligible for an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing. If she’s turned down, she could apply for a “pre-removal risk assessment.” That would determine whether she faces any serious danger, including death and persecution, if she ends up in Albania. She says if she is deported there as the U.S. wants, blood feuds — a centuries-old horror in the Balkan nation — would put her life in danger. She says her Ottawa sister, who was deported to Albania from New York in 2005, was raped and repeatedly threatened by in-laws before she moved to Canada in 2008 and was given refugee status.
“If you only knew what my sister went through,” says Yucel. Blood feuds became prevalent again after communism’s fall two decades ago, sending many Albanians back to the customary laws of the ancient tribes.
Rahman, who is providing his legal services to Yucel for free, says he will also be working on having the baby reunited with his mother on compassionate grounds. Yucel says she also hopes her two older children will eventually be allowed into Canada.
Even if she is ultimately kicked out, it would take months, especially if she gets a hearing. Cases before the board take an average 22 months to be settled. Rejected applications can be appealed to the Federal Court of Canada.
When Muiat Yucel tried bringing his son into Canada almost two weeks ago, he was turned away after being questioned for several hours. He says border guards were suspicious of a number of things: How his wife got into the country; whether he was using the baby as a ruse to settle in Canada illegally; and the purpose of a lengthy stay in Iraq recently. (He works for an American company involved in foreign contracts.)
The Turkish-born Muiat says he has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and has a Green card, which gives him permanent residency. He says he expects to become an American citizen soon.
Whether that will help him sponsor his wife so she can return to the U.S. wasn’t clear Tuesday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration officials could not be reached for comment.
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