Deported mother pleas for the return of her daughter
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Rilvane Miranda dos Santos fears she won’t see her daughter ever again.
Deported from the United States in 2011, after spending 64 days in detention, she had to return to the state of Rondônia in her native Brazil without her 5-year-old daughter. In an effort to attain the right to have the child by her side, she launched an Internet campaign to bring awareness to her situation.
The little girl currently lives in the Greater Boston area with her father, who does not want her to leave the United States and has secured temporary custody.
dos Santos, 30, was arrested on April 14, 2011, while driving without a driver’s license in Brookline, Mass. She was placed under the custody of the U.S. Immigration Services because she was undocumented.
She entered the country illegally in 2005 through the Mexican border. She was placed in removal proceedings, but failed to appear for a crucial immigration court hearing.
In videos she posted on the Internet, dos Santos claims she was not allowed to see her daughter, Sarah Rabaça Duarte Miranda, while in detention. She also alleges that she was not given the opportunity to discuss the possibility of taking the child to Brazil.
She accuses Sarah’s father, Célio Duarte, of being negligent and trying to use his daughter to attain legal status in the United States.
“I was practically forced to leave [the country] without Sarah, because I was assured that the Brazilian government had a specific department to deal with this type of situation, which is not true,” said dos Santos in a phone interview from Brazil.
“It’s amazing to discover that it is more important for the United States to expel an illegal immigrant than to worry about the welfare of a U.S. citizen, who is apart from her mother at such a delicate age,” dos Santos added.
Duarte, who works as a driver for an Everett restaurant, gained provisory custody of Sarah and will return to Court on March 28 to dispute dos Santos and argue for permanent custody.
“My daughter lives well here, next to her sisters (Celio also has a 10-year-old daughter and his wife is pregnant). She has exemplary conduct in school,” Duarte said. “She has family here and more opportunities in a country that offers better conditions for a child.”
Sarah’s father denies dos Santos’s claims of having broken agreements and failed to honor financial obligations to her. He defends himself by saying that “This is not the time to discuss it.”
The estranged couple disagree on land and other matters in addition to their daughter’s fate.
“The land that she alleges she gave up claim to were mine before we met. I was still paying them, but they were mine,” he said. “As for the money, she lent me $6,000 and I paid it. There is only one other divergence. When I contracted the loan, the exchange rate 2.40 and when I went to pay it was 1.70. She wanted the difference.”
dos Santos will be represented at the March 28 hearing by a lawyer hired by the Brazilian Consulate in Boston. She believes he can prove that her daughter would have a better life by her side and that the father pays no attention to the child.
She also believes the U.S. Justice system will understand that she never wanted to be apart from the child and she puts hope in past cases where custody was awarded to the mother.
As for Duarte, he believes he can prove that the child will suffer hardship living in the interior of Rondônia.
“Rilvane can not afford to give Sarah what I can give her here,” he said.
dos Santos co-owns a clothing store with her mother in the city of Vilhena and hopes the U.S. Justice system will not grant legal status to Sarah’s father, because she believes this would separate her from her daughter forever.
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