When their parents are deported, what happens to US-born kids?
“I had no idea what was happening,” says Janna Hakim of the morning in 2010 when a loud knocking at her Brooklyn apartment door jolted her awake. It was the first Friday of Ramadan, and her Palestinian mother, Faten, was in the kitchen baking the pastries she sold to local stores.
Janna, then 16, and her siblings were all born here. None knew that their mother was in the U.S. illegally — or that a deportation order from years earlier meant she could be whisked away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and her family’s comfortable New York life could come crashing to a halt.
“I am not a criminal. I am the mother of American children and they need me, especially the younger ones,” she cried over the phone from Ramallah, where she is living with her own mother after 20 years away. “How can a country break up families like this?”