I am not going to tell the story of my life on this blog because that would feel like I am writing my book. I do am writing a book and the name of it is "Mom, we are Mexicans, aren't we?". My youngest son, Brennan, came up with that question a while ago. The whole situation our family is in really got him very confused. He is eight. He was born here so he has no memory of the things that happened to us before we came to the U.S. He was born at LDS hospital. But he feels and knows that even though he is an American citizen, our family is a little different from other families around us. He just does not understand why. He is just as paranoid as the other kids when an unknown car is parked too close to our house. He is suspicious when there are visitors at school that he cannot put a name on. He gets scared when the car behind us takes the same turns as we do.

I was born and raised in Belgium. My parents were Catholic. To my father it was very important that we went to church every weekend so the community could see our attendance. When I started to show interest in another religion my parents were upset. When I was 22 I decided to get baptized. Up until then I had been going to the Catholic Mass on Saturday night and to the LDS church meetings on Sunday for about two years. My parents at first tried to prevent me from getting baptized. A friend of theirs, a Catholic Priest, informed them that there was no legal way for them to stop me and that they might just aswell let me get baptized. He said that kids my age do stupid things and this stupid thing would not last long. He said I would come to my senses soon and was a member of the Catholic church for life anyway. He did not count on the possibility that maybe I would not change my mind. I met my husband shortly after I was baptized and we married three months later. It was when I started dating Dirk that my parents realized I was probably not going back to the Catholic church. They did everything they could think of to prevent me from getting married to Dirk. They even told my branch president to convince me that a marriage with a deaf guy was not an option. They contacted my home teachers too with the same request. We got married and when I was a member for a year we went to the Swiss temple to get sealed. We started having children and for a while it appeared that my parents had accepted the situation, kind of accepted it at least. I started to work for their business again, but I made it clear that I could only work for them in their legitimate business and did not want any part in all the other things they were doing that brought them even more money. After a few years I quit working for them. They started to invite the older kids to go to dinner with them at fancy restaurants, and at first I thought that was kinda neat. Soon though I realized that my children were not the only guests and that they were actually being introduced in my parents' other activities, a world of smuggling and fraud where I wanted my family to stay away from. So I had to tell my parents that I did not agree to exposing my children to their unlawful activities and that for that reason from that moment on they could come visit the children when either me or my husband were present. They tried one more time to pick up the kids while I was not there but our nanny, a girl from our ward, did not let them take the kids. This made my parents really mad and at first we did not hear from them for about a year. We did not see them either although their business was located in the city where we were living. One morning two of the kids were going to the bakery to get the bread to make the lunches for school and they saw both my parents standing by a light pole, waiting for them. My kids felt really threatened by the presence of my parents and did not go to the bakery but turned around and ran home. That was the beginning of a stalking that got worse and worse over the years. Sometimes it were my parents that we noticed or my brothers, but often it were just people that were being paid by my family. Sometimes we were being watched 24/7 but often it was also only me or the kids that were being watched. The children were very frightened at the time. I remember reaching the front door of my house in the morning and having to move all the furniture my kids had placed in front of the door to barricade it.

We did not realize that the Belgian government in the meantime decided to crack down on cults. They established a parliamentary commision to investigate cults and soon a list was drafted with 180+ dangerous cults. The LDS church was named as a dangerous cult on that list. This gave my relatives a strong weapon. They could now just complain that we were exposing our minor children to a dangerous cult and also every little allegation of abuse became suddenly a lot more powerful because of our membership in a dangerous cult.

In the meantime we decided that maybe we should move to another country and we were looking into going to Hungary eventually. My husband would have been able to keep his job as a truck driver. This was not a plan for the immediate future, we were just looking into the possibility. My husband wanted to visit his step sister in America before we would move to Hungary because he realized that once we moved money would be tighter. We bought plane tickets and we would leave Belgium on December the 16th and come back on the 31th. That is also the reason why we could afford the plane tickets, hotel reservations, and rental cars for two weeks. Not too many people wanted to fly on New Years Eve. We were at the time planning a two-week trip, not a move. We did not need a visa. With our passports we could visit the US and fly back.

But on December the 3rd is when everything escalated. The local police force blocked off the entire neighborhood. About ten armed police officers entered our house and took the children. They forced me to drive my car to the police station, with a police officer sitting next to me in my car. They refused to give me permission to call an attorney or a friend. From the police station I was taken in a police car to a courthouse in Antwerp. All this happened while my husband was gone to work. I was six months pregnant of number eleven. The judge shed more light on our situation. I was still denied the right to talk to an attorney. She told us that in order to get our children back we had to become normal Belgians. Normal Belgians are not Mormon. We had to change our religious affiliation within the next six weeks to get the children back. From the courthouse I had to go to another address that I had to look for. I did not have my car so I did a lot of walking that day. I felt really sick because of the stress and my pregnancy. I had not been able to eat and that too really messed me up. Those who know me know that I really have to eat to function. When I came there to talk to the case worker I was told where the children were and that I could visit them supervised for an hour a day. I was also told that the case worker assigned to our case just left on a vacation that day. From there I had to find a way to get back to my own town and get my car. In the meantime I had contacted my husband's employer and my husband was going to meet me at the house where the kids were being held. We talked to the people in charge. We did not know at that time that they had already noticed that something was not right with this case since my parents tried to get to the kids long before I could even know where the kids were. I told them we wanted the kids seen by a doctor immediately. They refused to let that happen even though they could pick the doctor. The next day we hired an attorney and he again requested that they were seen by a doctor of their choice. The doctor immediately stated that the children were not abused or neglected. Soon the people at the safe house were more and more convinced that something was really different from the cases they usually get. Within a week the case workers and social workers all agreed that what happened to us was not justified. A week after they were taken I received a phone call from a case worker who told me that they finished their investigation in our favor. They said that if they would however give us the kids back they had to let the local police know within a week and they were convinced that those raids would happen over and over again. I was told that they could get the necessary signatures from people in higher places and give us the kids back in case we had a possibility to immediately leave the country. I did what every mother would have done. I told them I already had tickets and we were going to America the next week. I realized we did not have the right visa to stay but I did not have any other options in the fight to get my kids back. The next few days we did research on our options if we were just to stay here and we found that we could apply for asylum within a year of our arrival. Again, we never planned to come here and stay here illegally, we just did not have another option than to come here and to exhaust all legal venues hoping to be safe and keep our family together.

The night before we could board a plane the case workers took the kids to a van and brought them to the hotel where we were waiting for them. The next morning we were on our way. It felt like we were jumping into a black hole. We came here and Scott was born almost three months later. There were some complications and the doctors did not want me to travel. We filed paperwork to extend our stay. For asylum we had to file within a year of our arrival and we needed some time to collect proof. We applied for asylum on time. We had all these hearings and meetings and paid a lot of money. After 18 months or so we received our first work authorization cards and these were good for a year. When we had our hearing with an immigration judge there was a bus waiting for us on the parking lot. It was obvious that the plan was to detain us. The judge had already written down the word DENIED before the hearing even started. At the end of the meeting he told us that he could not approve our asylum because we come from Belgium, a friendly ally of this country. But he said that he realized that our case was not frivolous and now we were given the possibility to appeal our case. Personally, I believe that denying our case just based on the fact that we come from a particular country is not within the UN stipulations on asylum. The UN has stated that there is no country on the face of the earth that can not produce legitimate asylum seekers.

We went from appeal to appeal and were denied every time. We were also denied voluntary departure. We ended up in a situation where we were not allowed to stay and not allowed to leave. Our attorney said we had to wait for a bag and bagage letter before we could apply for deferred enforced departure. When we were here for ten years we tried to apply for deferred enforced departure. We were not able to apply for this form of deportation relief because we were too legal in the ten years that we were here. If we had come here at tourists, bought false documentation, and started working and kept quiet for ten years we would have been able to apply for deferred enforced departure and the chances are high that it would have been approved. We are too legal, imagine that.

 

We are now under an order of supervision. ICE came to our house in December of last year. We never received a bag and bagage letter. We are supposed to get our passports ready to leave. We are working on getting our passports ready but burocracy is just as slow in other countries as it is here. We ran into delay after delay and none of these delays are fabricated by us. But the ICE officer does not believe us and threatens to detain us next time. While we are complying with getting our passports ready, we haven't completely given up either. We filed papers for deferred action, a procedure that usually takes about two months. The papers were filed right before the weekend and denied right after. We do not believe that the person in charge carefully reviewed all the paperwork in our case in such a short time. Sharon Garn, the immigration specialist at senator Hatch's office has tried to make ICE review our case again, but they refuse. We do not want to give up and hope support from others and possible media attention will encourage them to review our case. We also hope to convince a senator to introduce a private bill in our behalf, to keep our family together. We have two daughters that are married here and they are permanent residents who are able to petition for us in about 2 years. One son-in-law is in the army and we help our daughter with our grandchild while he is in training. Our son Dirk is engaged to an American citizen but he does not want to get married until there is a solution because he does not want to give her family the impression that he is just trying to find a solution for his immigration problems by getting married. Two more of the children are engaged to a citizen because they were raised here, they grew up here, made their friends here. Our son Nathan and his former girlfriend are co-parenting their son Shawn. If Nathan leaves he will no longer be able to see his infant son and Kelli will not have our and Nathan's support raising him. Our two youngest are American citizens. Two years from now my two daughters can petition for us, so if we could get the immigration services to agree to tollerate us for now we would no longer need to call it asylum. In ten years from now our son Scott can petition for us and bring us back here. What is the use of kicking us out. If we do not come up with an incredible amount of money to leave on our own then it would be the American tax payers who would have to pay for our forceable removal. Eventually we will be able to come back, the path is made for that unintentionally over the last eleven years here.

If we go to Belgium we will run again into the same situation. Actually, it will be worse. More then a year after we came here the local Belgian police has tried to start over while we were here. We were convicted in absentia of abusing our children in the year before we came here and for which we have documented proof that we were cleared of abuse. We supposedly abused our children in the two weeks that we were only able to have supervised visits with our children and we were and remained in good standing with the people that worked at the safe house. And we supposedly abused our children in the first few weeks that we were already here. Besides the fact that we were not in the jurisdiction of the Belgian police, there was no way they would have known if we did abuse our children.

We hope to stay here, united with our children. Starting over by moving internationally with a family of 12 people is not as easy as ICE seems to think. If we cannot come to a permanent solution here, then I hope we can get a reasonable time period set up to give us a way to prepare for a safe third country. Applying for the right visa takes time. Right now the way to get into a safe country would be the same as how we got here. We would have to go in with our passports. But Canada does not allow us to apply for asylum when we come there because we already tried it here.

 

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Posted 11-16-2009 12:10 PM by Chrystal van der Spek-De Maerschalck