By Allan Wall
10/06/2013
The struggle of the German homeschooling Romeike family to receive asylum in the U.S. can be approached from several different angles — religious freedom, homeschooling, immigration, and what appears to be an unmistakable anti-white bias in the Obama Administration. See my previous articles: Eric Holder’s DOJ Finds Some Foreigners It Wants To Deport — White Evangelical German Homeschoolers, followed two months later by More On The Romeike Case — What’s Wrong With Wanting White Immigrants? Now there is new, horrifying evidence of what the Romeikes face in Germany.
To summarize: Uwe Romeike and his wife Hannalore are music teachers who fled their native Germany in 2008 because of harassment they received from the government for home schooling. They had been fined and were facing the possibility of losing custody of their children. They settled in Tennessee and applied for asylum.
The Romeikes received asylum, like the majority of asylum applicants. On January 26, 2010, an immigration judge in Tennessee ruled in their favor. That would normally have been the end of the case — but not in Obama’s America.
Attorney General Eric “My People” Holder’s DOJ got involved, seeking to reverse the Romeikes’ asylum status. The Board of Immigration Appeals backed up Holder. The Romeikes appealed to federal court.
But on May 14th, the Sixth Court of Appeals ruled against the Romeikes, upholding the Obama administration’s asylum denial. (The judges: Ronald Lee Gilman, appointed by Bill Clinton; Jeffrey Sutton and John M. Rogers, appointed by George Bush.)[Decision in Romeike v. Holder (PDF)]
The court did acknowledge a constitutional right of Americans to direct their children’s education, but disagreed that the German policy amounted to a persecution meriting asylum according to U.S. law.
The Romeikes are being defended by the Home School Legal Defense Association, which is trying to get their case to the Supreme Court.
On May 24th, 27 Republican Members of Congress signed a letter [PDF] asking Holder to exercise the same kind of "prosecutorial discretion" that Obama and Holder are using with regard to millions of illegal DREAMers. He’s ignored them.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, a horrifying recent government action shows what would have happened to the Romeikes had they stayed there:
At 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 29, 2013, in what has been called a “brutal and vicious act,” a team of 20 social workers, police officers, and special agents stormed a homeschooling family’s residence near Darmstadt, Germany, forcibly removing all four of the family’s children (ages 7-14). The sole grounds for removal were that the parents, Dirk and Petra Wunderlich, continued to homeschool their children in defiance of a German ban on home education. The children were taken to unknown locations. Officials ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing their children “anytime soon”…The only legal grounds for removal were the family’s continuation of homeschooling their children.
Children Seized in Shocking Raid Home School Legal Defense Association, August 30,2013
The Wunderlich family had previously fled Germany for France. But that wasn’t enough for meddling German social workers, who reported them to the French. As a result, the Wunderlich children were detained four days, but then released, as homeschooling is not illegal in France. Later, the family resided in Hungary and Norway. They did have freedom to homeschool in these three countries, but Herr Wunderlich couldn’t find work. So the famiy returned to Germany. But since all German residents are required to register with local authorities, a criminal truancy case was inititated against them last fall, resulting in the August 29th seizure of their children.
The latest news: As of September 19th, the Wunderlich children were returned to their parents on the condition that they send them to public school. Not unnaturally the parents have agreed –otherwise they may have never gotten their children back. Wunderlich Children Returned on Condition of School Attendance HSLDA Sep. 19th, 2013.
This is what the Romeikes face if they return to Germany.
Still, homeschoolers in Germany have received some surprising support: Vernor Munoz, United Nations “Special Rapporteur on the right to Education”, visited Germany in 2006 and reported that
….Even though the Special Rapporteur [that is, Verner Munoz himself] is a strong advocate of public, free and compulsory education, it should be noted that education may not be reduced to mere school attendance and that educational processes should be strengthened to ensure that they always and primarily serve the best interests of the child. Distance learning methods and home schooling represent valid options which could be developed in certain circumstances, bearing in mind that parents have the right to choose the appropriate type of education for their children, as stipulated in article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The promotion and development of a system of public, government-funded education should not entail the suppression of forms of education that do not require attendance at a school. In this context, the Special Rapporteur received complaints about threats to withdraw the parental rights of parents who chose home-schooling methods for their children.
UN Human Rights Council: Addendum to the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Mission to Germany (13-21 February 2006),page 16. Emphasis added].
Back to the U.S.: Why, of all the 75,000+ asylum cases annually, did the Holder Department of Justice target the Romeike family — especially after the case had already been settled in the Immigration Court system?
Look at some other recent cases and how they turned out.
And some earlier cases
Really, does anybody expect any of the Romeikes to do anything like this?
Some might also contend that asylum and immigration are two different things. Nowadays, they aren’t. Look what’s happening on the border. As our own Brenda Walker reported in August, hundreds of detained Mexican illegal aliens are now requesting asylum by claiming a “credible fear of persecution” by drug cartels, if returned to Mexico. Not only are such “asylum-seekers” not deported, they are accommodated in hotel rooms, at your expense, of course.
The drug cartel war in Mexico is bad, but the whole country is hardly a freefire zone 24/7. In much of the country, life is tranquil, and the Mexican economy is doing well. The vast majority of Mexican emigrants to the U.S. aren’t “fleeing” anything — they are “pursuing” higher wages.
And yet the Obama administration takes illegal alien Mexicans at their word, while attempting to deport a family of white Christian homeschoolers.
It really does make you wonder, doesn’t it?
American citizen Allan Wall moved back to the U.S.A. after many years residing in Mexico. Allan’s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
