Immigration Officials at SFO Separate Haitian Brothers, Send 9-Year-Old to Migrant Shelter

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Immigration authorities at San Francisco International Airport have taken a 9-year-old Haitian boy away from his brother, an East Bay college student, and sent him to a shelter for unaccompanied migrant children in Southern California.

The move came in the final hours of the Trump administration, which has been widely condemned for separating thousands of immigrant families over several years.

Both brothers were traveling with U.S.-issued visas. Christian Laporte, 19, was returning to attend classes at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, after spending the Christmas holidays in Haiti with his family, according to attorney Milli Atkinson, who is representing the brothers. She said Laporte’s younger half-brother, Vladimir Fardin, was accompanying him for a visit and had a tourist visa.

When they arrived at SFO Sunday afternoon from Haiti via a flight from Mexico, immigration officials refused to let the brothers enter the U.S. due to visa problems, according to a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Atkinson said the pair was held at the airport for more than 24 hours, their visas were taken away and they were not permitted to speak to her or to family members.

Atkinson, who is legal director for the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, called the lack of communication, especially with a child, “a frightening aspect of our immigration system.”

On Monday night, authorities took Fardin to a shelter, Atkinson said, but they would not tell her where he was going. He was eventually able to speak to his mother, after arriving at a facility in San Diego run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she said.

Designating Fardin an unaccompanied minor was unnecessary and could lead to a long and damaging separation, said Atkinson.

“This system is designed to protect children from trafficking. But it was clear from the moment he entered that this was not a trafficking situation,” she said. “It’s a long bureaucratic process and it could possibly be months before he can see his family again.”

She added that immigration officials have a lot of leeway in how they handle visa irregularities at ports of entry, and could have warned the family about tourist visa rules and allowed the brothers into the country conditionally while Laporte sorted out his student visa paperwork.

“Every step of the way they had a great deal of discretion and in every instance they used that discretion to separate these children and prevent the 9-year-old from returning to his family in a safe way,” said Atkinson.

She added that since the brothers’ experience came to light, other immigration attorneys are sharing stories of Haitian and African immigrants traveling with visas being denied entry.

“They’re both Black and they’re from Haiti,” Atkinson said, making reference to then-President Donald Trump’s widely reported 2018 remark that Haitians, Salvadorans and Africans are from “shithole countries” and that the U.S. would be better served with more immigrants from Norway.

“You know, we have to question whether or not this would have happened to two children from Sweden coming to return to school,” Atkinson said.

The family is urgently seeking Fardin’s release, she said.