"Think about it," said the young, dark-haired woman sitting across the table in the fast-food restaurant. "You are sitting with your family on Sunday afternoon, with all your family, grandmother, brothers, sister, their husbands and wives and children, your own children, all together. All the food is on the table (prepared) only the way your mother can make it at home," she reminisced.
Zieba Saqib (the name she gave) is a political and human rights refugee from Afghanistan. Her middle-class, well-educated family fled their home in the Hindu Kush region of the central Asian country out of fear that they would become victims of the Taliban’s reign of terror.
They arrived together, parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, children and Zieba. They appreciated the asylum they received and loved America because, as Zieba said, "It is a country that rewards hard work and gives everyone a chance to be somebody if they work."
So after settling in at their new home just north of Cape May County, they expected to live a normal life, free of fear.
What they got was otherwise.
It was the family custom to gather at the home of one of the brothers who had a house big enough to accommodate everyone. Sunday was a day that everyone had off. On this particular Sunday a few years ago, just before everyone was about to eat, there was a knock at the front door.
Zieba’s brother Omar went to answer it.
She heard raised voices and then her brother slammed the door. The knocking resumed.
"I asked my brother what is going on and he said they wanted to see my 6-year-old nephew to make sure he was not being abused," she said.
One of the male police officers convinced her brother to let the female DYFS worker into the house to see Omar’s son.
The DYFS agent explained that they had received a complaint from someone saying the boy had been injured when he got between his parents during a fight they were having.
"It is then I knew it was my fault," said Zieba. She then told how one day at work she complained to a co-worker about the attitude of the men in her family and told of the fight between her sister and her brother-in-law, which she believed her nephew witnessed.
"Where I come from they treat women like dogs," said Zieba, speaking of the Taliban, "and even though my (male) relatives are not really like that they want to boss the woman around sometimes and it gets me mad. It was my fault."
Her co-worker apparently took this complaining to be something more than it was and called the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), which triggered the unwelcome Sunday visit.
What happened next terrified the family. Amid wailing, screams and verbal protests, the 6-year-old boy, who even under the Taliban had not been separated from his family, was taken away by a DYFS agent with her armed police escort. Since there was no appropriate family member available to place him with, he was sent into foster care.
"They made him eat pork," said a nearly crying Zieba as she retold the story. The Saqib family is Sunni Muslim and forbidden by their religion to eat pork.
Her nephew eventually was returned home. Zieba never told her family that she had complained to a co-worker. She relocated and does not see them very often any more.
But worst of all is that they do not feel safe in America anymore, she said.
"Even if something bad happens in the family and maybe we should get help, nobody will ever get the police or go to a center for advice. DYFS has isolated my family – especially the women," Zieba added.
The woman sitting next to her nodded in agreement. "It isn’t exactly terrorism but it’s the next worst thing," said Vlaska Vardar (not her real name). Vlaska is as blue-eyed as Zieba is dark-eyed, and she had not known Zieba before this conversation but they both had a DYFS story in common.
Vardar lives and works in the large Eastern European community in Atlantic County. She lives alone but it was not always so. "I have a son," she said.
She is well educated, well spoken and clever. She came to the United States nearly 10 years ago after the fall of Communism in her country.
"I remember the secret police when I was little. I remember we were poor and often cold. I always dreamed of America but I guess you have your problems, too," she said.
Her DYFS troubles began at her son’s daycare center. He had a minor accident while playing and they took him to the local hospital for a couple of stitches. While at the hospital the doctor engaged the child in conversation, asking him what he ate at home. "My son is such a picky eater. When he was 4 he would only eat cereal and toaster (pastry) pops no matter what I put in front of him," his mother remembered.
So when the doctor asked what he ate he said he only ate "pops" (Pop Tarts). The zealous medical man telephoned DYFS, even though the medical report noted that the child was "well nourished." Vardar had kept a copy of the report and offered it for inspection, crumpled and old as it was.
Within a couple of days a DYFS agent was at her door demanding to look into her refrigerator and recommending that she attend nutrition classes. "I couldn’t believe it. Here was some strange person examining my refrigerator and saying ‘What is this? Why isn’t this covered with a lid? You should have skim milk." She laughs as she retells the incident, but the contact with DYFS was no laughing matter for her, she said, even though they did not take her son and did not contact her again.
"I know about secret police I was not going to risk my son," she said very seriously. So she had her lawyer draw up papers turning custody over to the boy’s father. But how did this remove him from DYFS’s reach?
"He is Roma, my son’s father. No one will ever get him. Now, I can sleep and work and make a lot of money," she said with an air of satisfaction, while still admitting that she missed him a lot. (In the United States the Roma are known as gypsies, a nomadic and closely- knit group who refuse to comply with the general society’s definition of culture and preserve their own ancient traditions and customs.)
Judge Valerie Armstrong is well respected among her peers and with the public at large. She is accessible, affable and articulate. Until recently, when she became the administrative judge for Atlantic and Cape May counties, she heard DYFS cases for 10 years.
"The objective is always to reunite the family or keep it together," said the experienced jurist, after explaining the intricacies of the law that give DYFS the extraordinary powers it exercises.
The court’s role is clearly defined and its powers are less amorphous than those of the division.
"There is a whole statutory scheme that governs the way the court handles these matters," explained Armstrong.
The individual cases are pretty well defined by DYFS before they ever even reach a courtroom where they are presented to the court without rebuttal. The court initially gets to see only the product of their investigation in the initial show cause hearing in most instances.
"These cases are very fact sensitive," said Armstrong. "Each case is unique, like fingerprints."
She also explained that the legislation permitted the removal of children by DYFS without a court order. The court’s oversight was usually after the fact and their approval was not required beforehand. According to the judge the legislation spoke to the "imminent danger to the life, safety or health of the child," but there seemed to be a wide latitude of discretion as to what that meant under the legislation requiring a great deal of good faith in the individual judgment calls of DYFS agents.
Armstrong cautioned that she would expect agents of DYFS to ask the question, "Is this situation so drastic that this child must be removed?"
Armstrong was also very concerned for the plight of those who came before her who were from foreign countries.
I realize how hard it must be to leave your country and come to a new one with new customs, new laws, new rules, and a new language, but I am charged with applying the statutes and laws of this country and the state of New Jersey as enacted by the Legislature," she said.
There are cultures and countries that countenance the beating of women and children, sometimes even for religious reasons and if they come before Armstrong she applies the law while doing her best to help the new residents adjust. "The rewarding part is where you can have a roll in reunification of a family. That is very satisfactory," she concluded.
Some immigrant families will do whatever is required to make sure they never meet the dedicated Armstrong.
The family of Marie Dorce (her pseudonym) came to the United States in 1995. Before that, no one in her family had ever used a telephone, opened a refrigerator or driven a car.
She had grown up on the island nation of Haiti with almost nothing but her family. "We only had each other," said the soft-spoken Marie. "When we came here we all got jobs," said Marie.
The younger children went to school but not before they were taken aside by an older uncle who laid down the rules and explained the pitfalls of education in America.
"My uncle told us never to tell the teachers anything that went on at home or answer their questions. He said if they did not listen, the DYFS people would come and take us away from our family," Marie said.
One of the children in the family went to school wearing patched clothes and a school employee called DYFS about it. When the boy returned home from school, the mother and her family returned to Haiti, and poverty, because they feared what the state organization might do to them.
"My grandmother lived on a dirt floor with her eight children and she made them go to school and study and work. And when they didn’t listen they got hit with a strap. And now we go to college and have good jobs," she said.
She did not see anything wrong with using physical discipline on her own children when they needed it, but would be afraid for any strangers to find out because she thought it was against the law in New Jersey.
According to DYFS spokesman Andy Williams, "Spanking and physical discipline is still legal in the state although it is against DYFS policy and you cannot be an adoptive or foster parent if you use it."
When asked if he didn’t find the DYFS position inconsistent with the state law and likely to give parents mixed messages, he offered no response.
Vlaska Vardar expressed the immigrants’ feelings the best when she said, "Where I came from I had no rights, no voice, no existence. I came here to stand on my feet. I didn’t come to America to lose my child. It is not acceptable to live in fear."
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