The U.S. gave asylum to a gay mother. Why did only one son get to … – San Francisco Chronicle

Angeline has never actually seen her eldest son, Amal, play a video game. But after countless pictures, videos and phone calls, she knows the gift will be just right.

At the register, Angeline asks the attendant about the Nintendo consoles behind her. One is newer, the attendant says; it’s the best model on the market. Immediately, Angeline nods her head. It’s an expensive gift, especially for someone like Angeline, who works nights in a hospital while at nursing school. But Amal, 12, doesn’t ask for much.

“Just the video game,” Angeline says. “And to come home.”

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The former, Angeline can take care of. But since she fled her native Cameroon in 2015, Angeline has been struggling to achieve the latter. Nearly eight years after her arrival in the United States, there is still no Amal.

Today, Angeline and her lawyers are tangled in a federal asylum logjam, one exacerbated by Cameroon’s criminalization of her sexuality, shifting immigration policies in the United States and an ever-climbing backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

In keeping with its policy on anonymous sources, The Chronicle is using aliases for Angeline and her two Cameroon-born children because of the risks to Amal’s safety in Cameroon. Amal means “hope,” and was chosen at Angeline’s request for a synonym of the word.

Forced to flee

Today, Angeline lives in Oakland with her wife and two sons. Her 5-year-old, who was born after Angeline arrived in the United States, wears bright blue glasses. Her 9-year-old, who was born in Cameroon, is big for his age, and continues to grow fast.

But it’s Amal — Angeline’s only adopted child — who everyone says resembles her the most. They both have fair complexions; they both have the same quiet, gentle personality. For the first five years after Amal was born, he and Angeline were attached at the hip, even as her life dissolved around her.

Sixty-seven countries criminalize same-sex relationships, with sentences ranging from fines to life in prison to the death penalty. In Cameroon, having a same-sex relationship can lead to five years in prison — and violence and persecution against LGBTQ people is widespread.

The Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS, a human rights organization that advocates for LGBTQ people, reported such attacks as on the rise. During the first half of 2022, the group recorded 32 cases of violence and abuse against LGBTQ people in Cameroon, an increase of 88% from 2021. The true figures are murky, but probably much higher, with little to no recourse for those committing crimes against LGBTQ people.

For Angeline, that meant that at age 29, she lost everything. Her family had long suspected Angeline was gay. Under increasing pressure from her relatives, she married a man in her early 20s. She tried to make it work. No matter what she did, it didn’t.

During the first few years of her marriage, Angeline had a series of miscarriages. Her relatives — who had caught Angeline with girlfriends in the past — blamed the miscarriages on her being gay, according to an affidavit in Angeline’s granted asylum application.

The weight of that blame was suffocating, and as the years passed without a child, her marriage began to deteriorate. Her husband was constantly traveling, telling Angeline there was no reason he should come home if his wife couldn’t give him a baby.

After Angeline’s third miscarriage, her friend met a woman who was planning to have an abortion. Instead, the woman agreed to a surrogacy arrangement: She would have the child, on condition that she would have no part in the family’s life.

“I have not nor will I ever consider this child to be my son,” Amal’s biological mother said in a 2016 affidavit. “He has always been the son” of Angeline.

At the hospital, the surrogate signed in as Angeline herself. Immediately after, Angeline became Amal’s de facto mother. She was thrilled, and for a while, Angeline said, so was everyone around them.

Three years later, Angeline gave birth to a baby boy, David. Both boys grew up assuming Angeline was Amal’s biological mother; and with Angeline living in another part of Cameroon while completing a teacher training program, her family, friends and husband did too.

Two years after David’s birth, Angeline’s husband caught Angeline with another woman. Terrified, Angeline told the woman to run — and Angeline was left to face her husband’s rage. According to Angeline’s affidavit, he beat her. After he called the police, the officers dragged Angeline from the house and into a patrol car.

For two weeks, Angeline was detained in a small, windowless room in the police station and given only water, her affidavit states. “We will fix you,” the guards reportedly told her. They raped her repeatedly, resulting in a lifelong medical condition later confirmed by the Tenderloin-based San Francisco Community Health Center.

Upon her release, Angeline found her belongings outside her house. Her husband shouted at her to leave, pushing Amal and David into her arms. Angeline was fired from her teaching job, barred from her church choir and shunned by her family.

“I lost everything,” Angeline said.

Angeline and her sons bounced around friends’ homes. But each time, people began to ostracize their hosts once they found out they were protecting a lesbian.

After arranging for the boys to stay with a trusted friend, Angeline made the decision to leave. For her and her family’s safety, she said, she needed to get far away from Cameroon.

“We hear so many stories like this: people leaving everything behind for the chance to save the ones they leave,” said Harris Salim, a communications manager at LGBTQ+ rights organization Immigration Equality. “For LGBTQ people specifically, that can become a matter of life or death.”

A secret adoption

Angeline arrived in the United States in March 2015. She received asylum the next year, and immediately after, began the process for her sons. Their applications were for derivative asylum, which allows dependents to follow a mother, father or spouse who has received asylum.

David’s application was straightforward. He was Angeline’s biological child, and all the paperwork supported that. In Amal’s documentation, however, Angeline’s lawyers explained that her eldest son was customarily adopted.

Despite affidavits from Amal’s biological mother, who explained the adoption and the surrogacy; a DNA test to prove the biological mother’s identity; and documentation showing Angeline and Amal’s relationship, USCIS sent a letter denying his application because Amal was not Angeline’s biological child, stepchild or formally adopted child — something Angeline and her lawyers had acknowledged years prior.

In the same letter, USCIS also warned that the relationship could be fraudulent, given that Angeline did not have a formal adoption of Amal, and the fact that Angeline kept Amal’s adoption a secret from those around her.

But according to Angeline’s lawyers, the reason Angeline kept that secret was the same reason she was granted asylum in the first place — fear of persecution, violence and imprisonment because of her sexual orientation.

“She was trying to save her life, and trying to stop these rumors about her: that she’s a lesbian in a country where it’s against the law,” said Hila Cohen, Angeline’s pro bono attorney and senior associate at international law firm Morrison & Foerster. “And when it was found out that she was a lesbian, she was arrested and abused. Obviously, she’s going to do what she has to do to save her life.”

USCIS declined to comment on the decision, stating that as a rule, the agency does not share, confirm or deny immigration information about any particular case.

“We’ve been going in a big circle here,” said Shannon Sibold, a partner at Morrison & Foerster also involved with Angeline’s case. “There’s concern on the U.S. side that the birth certificate is not sufficient in light of the circumstances in which it was garnered. But on the Cameroonian side, they have a birth certificate that says (Angeline) is the mother. So, if she tries to go through the process of adopting the child, they’ll say: You’re already the mother. Who are you adopting?”

Still, Angeline’s team has continued fighting to prove the parent-child relationship. After five years of rejection and stalemate, in 2021, Cohen and her team sent a letter to San Francisco Democrat and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urging her to examine the case and take action.

They never received an answer.

Documentation and delay

According to legal experts, though Amal’s adoption circumstances are unique, the broad strokes of his case are not.

“There are tens of thousands of families waiting years to be reunited, and there is all too commonly a failure by the agencies to recognize the circumstances of individuals and their abilities to access certain kinds of official documentation, by virtue of the status that we have already recognized (for) them,” said Melissa Keaney, a senior staff attorney at the New York-based International Refugee Assistance Project.

Around the same time Amal and David were applying for asylum, the Trump administration implemented sweeping changes across USCIS. In 2018, new policies were introduced to make it more difficult for individuals to claim asylum, a change that occurred while staffing and resources were being depleted.

From 2018 to today, the time it takes to receive a preliminary decision on a derivative refugee or asylum petition — the first of a two-step process — has jumped from eight months to nearly 29, according to data from USCIS.

Despite changes implemented by the Biden administration, which led to an increase in the number of individuals granted asylum in immigration courts, as of June 2022, the cases of nearly 26,000 asylee and refugee dependents are still pending, according to USCIS data. During the 2021-22 fiscal year, just 5,614 derivative asylum and refugee cases were approved.

“What we see has really changed is this additional level of scrutiny that they (USCIS) are applying to require all kinds of additional documentation at that first stage, about whether or not there’s an eligible relationship, and often requiring documents that are unavailable to individuals who are refugees or asylees,” Keaney said.

A brothers’ bond

More than four years after Angeline fled Cameroon, she and her legal team stood at the arrivals gate of San Francisco International Airport. Angeline stood with Cohen, Sibold and a group of her friends, all of whom held soccer clothes, shoes and balls in their arms.

Angeline, though, wasn’t carrying anything.

“I had to hold my heart,” she said.

As the crowds began to diminish, 6-year-old David entered the room, accompanied by an airline associate. Angeline collapsed to the airport floor and held David tight until her lawyers and friends told her that it was time to go.

“I was so happy. But at the same time, my joy was short. The boys weren’t together,” said Angeline.

From the ages of 2 to 6, Amal was the only constant in David’s life. For years, the boys hopped from house to house, staying with whoever Angeline — from thousands of miles away — could find to take them, she said.

Angeline couldn’t trust her family or anyone who knew about her sexuality to treat the boys with care. As she waited for a decision from USCIS, the pool of people willing to take Amal and David grew smaller.

Despite David’s relatively simple derivative asylum case, he was stuck in processing limbo for three years. Once David joined his mother, Amal — now on his own — continued shuttling from acquaintance to acquaintance, often without reliable care. On three separate occasions, Angeline said, Amal was hospitalized for malnutrition and anemia.

“Sometimes, I want to just go back and get him, or stay with him — and whatever happens to me, happens to me,” said Angeline.

When asked what would happen if she did go back to Cameroon, her answer was simple.

“They would kill me,” she said. “But sometimes, I feel like it doesn’t matter.”

Today, Amal’s living arrangements have stabilized, as he is living with an acquaintance of Angeline’s in Cameroon. But still, Angeline worries about him. Every time they speak, she said, Amal asks her why Angeline chose David instead of him. Whenever Angeline speaks to her acquaintance, she says that she is worried about Amal: He’s always in his room, she said, and he always wants to be alone.

In Angeline’s apartment, photographs of Amal are plastered to the refrigerator, peeking from the corners of framed certificates and awards. But his absence reverberates.

“Love has nothing to do with blood,” Angeline said. “I want people to know that (Amal) — he’s everything.”

In early December, Angeline received a message from 9-year-old David’s teacher at his Oakland elementary school. They had a fire drill, the teacher said, but instead of going outside with the other children, David went back to his desk. When the school principal tried to speak to him, he refused to leave his chair.

“When I picked him up, he said: ‘I don’t care if fire burns me,’” Angeline said. “I said, ‘Why? Why would you say that?’ He said, ‘I need my brother.’”

One last shot

In some ways, Angeline’s journey can be traced by Christmases.

She would like to think fondly of the last one she spent with Amal. But that Christmas was the worst of her life.

Still in Cameroon, she and the boys — just 2 and 5 at the time — were hiding at her friend’s house. They had to be ready to hide with a moment’s notice. If any of the friend’s relatives came to visit, Angeline would gather the children and leave, circling the outskirts of the neighborhood until it was safe to come back.

“There were no new clothes, no new toys, nothing,” Angeline said. “That Christmas wasn’t a Christmas at all.”

This holiday, the mood was lighter. Angeline prepared by stringing Christmas lights across her apartment. When the boys got home from school, the twinkling colors outlined the walls, from the Cameroonian flag in one corner to the ornament-covered tree at the other. On the day of, the family played bingo, danced to Cameroonian songs and exchanged presents under the tree.

And they missed the son and brother who was 8,000 miles away.

“Christmas will never be complete without (Amal),” Angeline said. “I always hope that next year, maybe, finally, it will happen.”

When Cohen first took on Angeline’s case, she was a summer associate at Morrison & Foerster, with one more year of law school ahead of her. In the years since, Cohen has climbed the ranks both personally and professionally: She is now a senior associate at the firm, and has three children of her own.

“Seeing how much my kids have changed, and knowing how much (Amal) must have changed?” said Cohen, wiping her eyes. “The amount of time that has gone by just feels very real.”

In June 2022, Morrison & Foerster submitted a humanitarian parole application for Amal to USCIS. Due to a documentation issue, USCIS received it last month.

Typically used to help individuals seek medical treatment, visit a sick family member or flee an urgent emergency, humanitarian parole is often viewed as a last resort for migrants with nowhere else to turn. Humanitarian parole only provides temporary status for an individual, and is not intended to be a long-term solution for relocation.

On top of that, over the last year, crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine have led to a surge in humanitarian parole applications. As of June 2022, 45,839 cases are currently “pending,” according to USCIS data.

That was before Amal’s application was added to the queue.

“I have come close to giving up, but there’s a reason why I keep trying,” Angeline said. “I still believe that one day, (Amal) will join me.”

Elissa Miolene is a journalist based in San Francisco and a former intern with The San Francisco Chronicle’s multimedia team. Twitter: @elissamio