Judge orders Filipino couple and 2 Israeli-born daughters kept in jail
No decision reached in appeal against deportation of family; dozens of friends of girls, aged 13 and 10, protest outside Tel Aviv court
A Tel Aviv court on Wednesday failed to reach a decision in an appeal against the deportation of a Filipino couple and their two Israel-born daughters, but ordered that the family remain in jail until the end of proceedings against them.
The family was arrested Sunday and taken to the Givon prison in Ramle ahead of their planned deportation to the Philippines. The arrests came as part of the Population Immigration and Border Authority’s new crackdown on foreign workers who overstay their work visas.
They were the fourth family with school-aged children to be arrested in the last several weeks.
The couple has been living in Israel for 20 years and their daughters, Mika, aged 13, and Maureen,10, study at the Balfour school in Tel Aviv.
Dozens of the school friends protested outside the court on Wednesday, with many breaking into tears as they chanted “Mika, Maureen, we are with you.”
After the court proceedings, the family members, including the children, were returned to the prison.
Israeli regulations stipulate that female foreign workers who become pregnant must send their babies home as a condition for their visas’ renewal. But many fail to do so and stay in the country illegally, often out of a desire to give their children a better life than they would get in their home country.
Last week a Filipino woman and her Israel-born teenage son were forcibly deported from Israel after successive court appeals failed to stop the measure.
Rosemary Peretz and her son Rohan were put on a plane and deported under guard, a day after a similar attempt was stopped at the last moment when the mother began to struggle while on the aircraft.
They marked the first family with school-aged children to be expelled after a series of arrests in recent weeks. Around 100 foreign workers have been arrested, most from the Philippines.
Earlier this month, migrants, their children and native Israelis staged a protest in Tel Aviv against the policy of deporting Israeli-born children of migrants.
Deportations of foreign workers, whether by agreement or forced, has faced criticism due to the impact it can have on their children who are born in the country, some of whom spend years in the Israeli system.
Some 60,000 foreign caregivers — most of them women — are currently employed in Israel, according to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, an advocacy and rights organization. Half of them are from the Philippines, with much smaller numbers from Nepal (15 percent), India, Sri Lanka and Moldova (10% each) and the rest from various Eastern European countries.
Agencies contributed to this report.
