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A family reunites after five years
Just last week, the Boise Airport was home to a momentously happy and long-anticipated occasion: Patrice Maneno and Wanyema Mitambo, whose story we shared last month, were finally reunited with their daughter Mauwa and her children after five long years apart.
The family was forced to flee war and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997 and spent decades in a refugee camp in Tanzania before Patrice and Wanyema were able to resettle in the United States. It took 30-year-old Mauwa and her four children another half decade to negotiate the exhaustive resettlement application process.
Some barriers to the reunion came as recently as this year. In early 2021, Mauwa had finally been approved for resettlement and was at the airport when she received the news that, because President Biden was delaying raising a Trump Administration record-low cap on refugee resettlement, her flight was cancelled. She didn’t know when she would be allowed to travel.
Luckily, when it seemed as if President Biden would maintain the Trump-era refugee admissions numbers until October, public reaction was swift. Americans spoke out and the president finally raised the resettlement cap to 62,500.
“We were missing each other and unhappy all the time because we were thinking about them, because they are our children,” Wanyema said about the years she and her husband were separated from their daughter and her family. “We didn’t feel settled without them here. We feel much safer now.”
“I am really very happy,” Patrice said. “This is a big celebration.”
See photos of their reunion and learn more about the family’s story.
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