#FamiliesBelongTogether

Thanks to our support, Noheli Sandoval-Laya finally has legal permanent residency in the US.

But she needs your help to bring her children here to join her, who she has been separated from for many years and desperately wants to see again. That day is almost here! We have helped her cut through the red tape, and now she just needs our donations to make it possible.

While we thank God that Noheli's status here is finally secure, her three children, Michelle (age 14), Karl (age 18), and Norelkis (age 20), and darling granddaughter Celeste (age 1½), are currently stranded in Trinidad, where they recently escaped to from their native town of La Victoria in Venezuela.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee's office has been crucial in advocating with USCIS and the US Embassy in Trinidad to remove bureaucratic obstacles and get approval for their visas to come here (pending some final legal and logistical hoops to jump through).

Your donation will go towards the following expenses:

$5400 - first, last and deposit for a larger apartment for the 5-person family (Noheli is currently renting a single room)

$3600 - two months of rent while they get on their feet, enroll Michelle in school, apply for benefits for the baby, and find jobs for Karl and Norelkis

$550 - vaccinations needed in Trinidad for US entry

$350 - medical exams needed for visa approval

$2100 - flights from Trinidad to US (baby flies free until November!)

$700 - remaining legal fees for humanitarian parole application for Celeste

$1300 - welcome supplies (clothing, furniture) upon arrival in US

***If you have JetBlue points that you would be willing to donate, please reach out to me directly.*** (JetBlue is the only carrier that flies direct from Trinidad to a city where the children can be met directly at the airport, to facilitate their passage through immigration).

How we got here:

Noheli Sandoval-Laya is a Venezuelan woman who applied for asylum on the US-Mexico border in 2018. She was then put in ICE custody for over 3 months, ending up at the Richmond detention center, where she found an attorney who contacted the Kehilla Immigration Committee. Noheli's health had spiraled down due to medical mistreatment in detention, and with our help, her lawyer won her release.

Our Kehilla accompaniment committee then assisted Noheli to get good medical care in 2018 and to win asylum in 2019. We connected her to East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a local immigrant rights organization that submitted her application for a green card in 2020 that she received in 2022. They also submitted asylee relative applications for her children that were approved in early 2021.

However, since the US and Venezuela do not have diplomatic relations, there is no American consulate in Venezuela where visas can be given to family members. Noheli spent several months in the Dominican Republic trying to get her children approval to travel there, with the idea that they would then apply for their visas to the US from the DR. That frustrated attempt wasted many months.

Finally, she gave up and returned to the US. Her children were able to escape to Trinidad (where granddaughter Celeste Xiaoling Lu-Sandoval was born in November of 2021), only to receive appointments for their visa application at... the US Embassy in Bogota, Colombia.

That was when we reached out to Congresswoman Barbara Lee's office, asking for her help to intercede with the Department of State and US immigration. Thankfully, Cesar Macias in her office has been amazingly supportive, making multiple phone calls and emails on Noheli's behalf to transfer the appointments from Bogota to the correct location, the US Embassy in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Of course, in the intervening months, Michelle's passport expired, with no way to renew it given that she is a minor and that the children are estranged from their father in Venezuela. Again, Cesar from Barbara Lee's office came to the rescue. It was outrageous to see how the embassy dismissed the needs of a 14-year-old girl living in very tenuous circumstances as a refugee, and impressive to see how all the objections melted away with the intercession of Congressional staff.

It's so sad that refugee rights are only respected when those of us with privilege and status intercede. Yet that is what it means for us to be allies in this moment.

We ask for your generosity to reunite this family. My own mother was the age that baby Celeste is now, when she escaped the Nazis in 1939 and landed in England as a refugee. She and her mom (my grandmother) were able to get out thanks to the support of a British couple who lied on immigration papers that they needed my grandmother as an au pair. That couple lives on in my family history as the people who saved at least those two members of my family from the gas chamber.

So now it is our turn to pay it forward and help rescue Celeste, her mom and the two teenagers from their perilous existence as Venezuelan refugees in Trinidad. They have a bright future awaiting them here in the US if we can only help them with this final step. Please join me in donating today!