Couple battles to reunite with young son stuck in India
Pair say they made a huge mistake in taking advice of immigration consultant who they say recommended waiting until arrival in Canada before sponsoring baby.
Bhavna Bajaj, an Ottawa lab technician, has been battling to have her son, Daksh, now 4, join her in Canada. Bajaj admits she made a mistake in not informing immigration officials when she became pregnant while still in India.
By: Nicholas Keung Immigration reporter, Published on Fri Dec 18 2015
It was the biggest mistake of their lives — and their little boy is paying the price.
Bhavna Bajaj found out she was pregnant while she and her husband were in the midst of applying to immigrate to Canada under the federal skilled worker program.
While waiting for the application to be processed, Bajaj gave birth to their only child, Daksh in June 2011. She said she emailed her immigration consultant from her hospital bed to alert Canadian officials of the arrival of the little one.
Instead, she said, the South Africa-based online immigration consulting firm they were using advised the couple to sponsor their son after their application was approved and they had arrived in Canada.
That turned out to be a huge mistake, one that’s haunting Bajaj and her husband, Aman Sood, because Canada’s immigration department bars any family member not included at the time of application from being sponsored to Canada in the future — a fact the couple learned only when they landed at the Montreal airport in January 2013.
And worse, Bajaj, now a medical lab technician in Ottawa, said they felt pressured by customs officials into signing a declaration that “we would never sponsor our child.”
For two years, the heartbroken parents have been fighting unsuccessfully to reunite with Daksh, who is now 4 and being cared for by his grandparents in Shimla in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
“They were given the wrong advice and made a tragic mistake. We are not saying the law is on our side. By law, there is no excuse for the couple,” said the family’s current lawyer, Hadayt Nazami, who is based in Toronto.
“But they wouldn’t have excluded the child. I see no reason the inclusion of the child in their application would have caused any problem for their immigration. The boy was healthy and wouldn’t have been inadmissible for any medical or security reason.”
An immigration department spokesperson said the “objective of the regulations is to encourage honesty and full disclosure” in the application process. “This provision has been consistently upheld by the courts as it helps prevent immigration fraud and human trafficking,” said spokesperson Nancy Caron.
The couple’s numerous attempts to bring Daksh to Canada — under family sponsorship and humanitarian and compassionate applications — have been rejected by immigration officials.
“Your parents failed to declare you as a dependent child at the time of the processing of their application for permanent residence in Canada. Upon arrival in Canada, your parents signed a declaration that they would not sponsor you in the future,” the High Commission of Canada in New Delhi said in a letter to Daksh. “Therefore, you are excluded as a member of the family class.”
While immigration officials agreed the immigration minister could make an exemption if humanitarian considerations such as “the best interests of a child directly affected” were justified, they concluded in August 2014 that there were “insufficient humanitarian and compassionate factors” in this case.
“Based on the information submitted in the application, it appears that the child never resided with his parents and continuously resided with his grandparents,” said the immigration department’s Caron.
“The child was living in an environment which was culturally and linguistically familiar to him, among people who had cared for him since birth. The humanitarian and compassionate considerations were refused.”
Bajaj, 31, said she has only been able to return to India to see Daksh once because both she and her husband, now a truck driver, were struggling to secure employment since their arrival. Although they chat every day with their little boy on Skype, it’s heartbreaking to watch him grow up over the Internet.
“Aman and I just cry all the time. We come home from work and we don’t even talk to each other because our child can’t be with us,” said Bajaj, who found a job as a lab technician earlier this year after toiling in unstable retail jobs.
“We came to Canada so our child can have a better life. My husband and I work very hard and we have never been on government welfare, even when life was difficult.”
An
online petition to Immigration Minister John McCallum by the family’s supporters has already collected more than 11,000 signatures.
“Human beings make errors, honest mistakes, and people should not be punished for them, especially when no harm was intended or done. One of the individuals concerned is so young and needs to be with his parents,” said Matthew Behrens, who started the petition.
On Tuesday, the family’s supporters will take the petition to Parliament Hill, pleading with the government to issue the little boy a temporary resident permit so he can join his parents here.
