Canadian family’s heartbreak as refugee sponsorship delayed 13 years

A Canadian family is speaking out about their long, painful wait to be reunited with loved ones after filing a private refugee sponsorship 13 years ago.

As political dissent against Yemen’s president escalated to armed clashes and military oppression in 2012, Labeb Al-Maflehi fled his homeland to escape a bloody revolution.

Al-Maflehi, his wife and sons made it to a United Nations refugee camp in Ethiopia, while his parents in Canada applied to sponsor his family to bring them to Ontario.

After more than 13 years, the Al-Maflehi family remains stranded in Addis Ababa, existing in limbo, awaiting an answer from federal immigration officials.

It has been more than 5,000 days since he fled Yemen. He has been unable to work, and his three sons are now teenagers, young men with little education, and no prospect of a future while they live in a foreign land as refugees.

In a letter provided to CTV News, Al-Maflehi described his “years of waiting and suffering.”

“An entire family lived on the margins of life – between the harshness of life in Ethiopia and the disappointment in a system that did not respond despite its promises and humanitarian commitments,” Al-Maflehi wrote.

The letter is one of many documents in a folder that Al-Maflehi’s father, Saleh, and his brother, Mukhtar, brought from Windsor to Ottawa to show to a CTV journalist. The folder contains copies of emails with IRCC officials, United Nations documents, and pleas for help to their member of Parliament and three immigration ministers, as well as federal court documents.

False hope and anxiety

The documents reveal deep frustration with Canada’s Group of Five private refugee sponsorship program and its toll on the stranded family in Ethiopia and their Canadian relatives.

More than a decade of bureaucratic non-answers have resulted in false hope — and ultimately heartbreak — for Al-Maflehi’s mother, who had not seen her son for more than 20 years.

“My mother just wanted to see her youngest son and her grandchildren. She’s sick and can’t fly to see him. She had cancer and now has passed away,” said Mukhtar, an engineer who lives in Windsor, Ont.

“We lost hope in (the) Canadian government. How can (the) system work like that?”

Mukhtar, the older brother, now worries his father, Saleh, who has a heart condition, may also not live long enough to see the outcome of their sponsorship.

Saleh Al-Maflehi, 77, first submitted a Group of Five refugee sponsorship application for his son, Labeb, his wife and their three sons in 2012, after they were given UN refugee numbers following their escape from Yemen.

In the application are signatures from 30 relatives — all Canadian citizens — who were willing to contribute their time and money to help settle the refugees. The application also included verification of funds that were being held in trust by the Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization (OCISO).

After fleeing Yemen, Al-Maflehi, a construction worker, was first interviewed by Canadian officials in 2016. Three years went by without any updates. Then came another round of interviews in 2019 and medical checks.

In the middle of the global pandemic, hope arrived in November 2021, when the family received an email from the High Commission of Canada in Nairobi, Kenya, stating that “all requirements have been met for visa issuance.”

The refugees were even sent temporary health-care numbers.

Meanwhile in Windsor, Mukhtar scrambled to find a house for his brother’s family.

One month later, that hope was shattered by another letter from the High Commission, which suddenly considered the Yemeni refugee a threat to security.

Court challenge to ‘cruel’ assessment

In the December 2021 email, the immigration officer wrote that after “careful consideration” of the application, it was determined that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that you are a member of an inadmissible class of persons in subsection 34(1).”

Al-Maflehi’s parents decided to appeal the decision in Federal Court — and won.

Documents reveal that the immigration officer rejected the application because Al-Maflehi admitted to participating in protests as part of the “Southern Movement.”

Consular officials alleged that he was part of a terror group trying to overthrow the government.

In Federal Court, Hart Kaminker, the family’s immigration lawyer, argued the determining officer only relied on information from one website and misconstrued what the “Southern Movement” was.

It was not a rebel group.

“The Southern Movement is just a descriptor of different groups advocating for greater rights for Southern Yemenis,” said Kaminker. “All Labeb did was participate in peaceful demonstration, just like people do all over the world when advocating for a particular cause.”

Kaminker says the majority of demonstrations were peaceful, and that in 2012, it was the Yemeni government that was the main perpetrator of violence.

The family’s appeal was heard in September 2023, and in February 2024, a judge ordered IRCC to have another immigration officer review the case.

Al-Maflehi and his family were re-interviewed this past summer, but there are no guarantees the outcome will be any different.

In more than three decades of practicing immigration law, Kaminker says he has never seen a refugee sponsorship case take so long to be assessed.

He calls the case “cruel” because immigration officials have put the family through “unnecessary anguish.”

Confidence in immigration system ‘undermined’

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) did not comment on this specific case, but in a statement to CTV News, the department said that processing times can be influenced by a “range of factors, including immigration targets, the complexity of individual cases, security screenings, and how quickly applicants respond to requests for information.”

Last November, IRCC temporarily paused private refugee sponsorship applications for one year to clear a backlog of more than 90,000 people waiting to be processed.

Warda Shezadi-Meighan with the World Refugee & Migration Council says the Al-Maflehi case shows how the “endless merry-go-round” is “undermining confidence” in Canada’s immigration system — for both applicants and sponsors.

“Our (private refugee sponsorship) program is lauded globally, but if we have this sort of delay and recurring pressures that we see over and over again in files — it really undermines the compassion the program is intended to bring,” said Shezadi-Meighan.

“I think the system is reflecting pressure, not a lack of compassion … but our generosity means very little if it takes 13 years to get to the other end.”