American officials abruptly informed an evangelical Christian family from Germany, who fled their nation one decade ago because they desired to homeschool their children, that their current asylum status has been revoked.
Uwe and Hannelore Romeike obtained “indefinite deferred action” asylum status in 2013 after nationwide pressure toward the Obama administration, thereby permitting them to homeschool their children. The couple were recently told that their status had been revoked and that the family has four weeks to apply for German passports so they can be deported, according to a press release from the Home School Legal Defense Association.
The Romeike family, who reside in east Tennessee, now has two children who are American citizens and two children who have married American citizens. “Deportation to Germany will fracture these families, while exposing the Romeikes to renewed persecution in Germany, where homeschooling is still illegal in almost every case,” the press release observed.
Home education has been illegal in Germany for more than a century, while private religious schools, which are often costly, must utilize state-mandated curriculum from the areas in which they are located. German parents who seek to provide their children with a distinctly Christian education have either left the country in recent years or faced forcible removal of their children.
Bradley Pierce, a constitutional attorney and the vice president of parental rights advocacy nonprofit Heritage Defense, said in comments to The Sentinel that the federal government should treat the Romeikes like “heroes, not outcasts.”
“Educating one's own children is a duty given by God to parents, not the government, and so the freedom to fulfill that duty is a fundamental human right,” Pierce commented. “Of all the cases it has to handle, it is disturbing that the federal government has set apart this Christian homeschooling family to deport.”
The expected deportation of the Romeike family indeed occurs even as the administration reports nearly seven million illegal immigrant encounters since Biden assumed office, according to the most recent data from United States Customs and Border Protection.
