On paper, Klaudia Banya is not Canadian. However, she arrived in Canada in 2009, barely 11 years old, and settled with her family in Niagara Falls, where she still resides – but perhaps not for long.
On January 15, her husband, Richard Maszlag, 35, was refused the Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA). He has three months to leave Canadian territory, his wife Klaudia, a permanent resident, and their four children. Three of them have Canadian citizenship, and the decision regarding the asylum application for the youngest is pending.
In the official document from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), which New Canadian Media was able to consult, the decision is justified as follows: “It has been determined that you are not subject to a risk of persecution , torture, a risk to your life or a risk of cruel or unusual treatment, or punishment if you return to Hungary” (free translation from English).
Never come back
Richard and Klaudia and their family belong to Hungary's Roma minority, which represents between 8 and 10% of the country's population, or between 700,000 and 900,000 people.
Amnesty International, in its 2023 annual report, observes racism and discrimination “in the areas of employment, housing and education”. The NGO also notes attempts at intimidation by far-right groups, apart from which “the police have not taken adequate measures”.
What this report reveals, Richard and Klaudia say they experienced it in their flesh. At the time when Klaudia and her family were seeking asylum in Canada, “Nazi groups were killing families in Hungary and neighboring countries,” she relates, referring to raids in the neighborhoods inhabited by her community, houses burned, or even neighbors, shot at point blank range in the middle of a street. Facts documented, at the time, by director Karl Nerenberg in Never Come Back (2011), a film about the Roma community in Canada, in which the Banya family appears in particular.
“They are not afraid of anyone,” says Klaudia, “they can shoot me, my children and my husband, and the [IRCC] is not aware of it.”
The IRCC has recognized the discrimination experienced by the Roma in Hungary, confirms a lawyer briefed on the case. Richard was not considered to be at risk of persecution.
Disunite to better unite?
In cases like that of the Banya-Maszlag family, it is impossible to know how many there are. Pierre-Luc Bouchard, a lawyer, also admits that “it is relatively common to see families where a member has an irregular status and who have difficulty regularizing their situation” at the Montreal Refugee Center where he works.
Questioned for this article, IRCC said it could not comment on the case of the Banya-Maszlag family, but assured that “the Government of Canada is determined to reunite the families.”
Family reunification is the option that the couple chose, even if a review of the decision concerning the PRRA could have been requested from the Federal Court. When made on Canadian territory, a request for family reunification currently takes 10 months and, from internationally, the delay amounts to 14 months, according to IRCC: a wait that Richard and Klaudia would have preferred to avoid.
But after putting off setting the date of their departure for as long as possible, hoping for a miracle or the equally divine intervention of their lawyer, the couple finally resigned themselves to taking a one-way ticket in the name of Richard Maszlag, on May 8.
“A family should not be separated”
Klaudia and their children should also soon cross the Atlantic again. With a newborn at home – a two-bedroom apartment she shares with her parents – she says she is not ready to return to work.
“I am not able to support us financially, with the children”, she says. “I will have no choice in following him”.
“Our family is at great risk. Our lives, the future of our children,” says Klaudia, who has a disastrous memory of her husband’s first expulsion, in 2019, when their first child was then one year old, and “it’s a huge trauma for [the child],” who did not speak until he was three-and-a-half years old. The young woman then joined Richard in the United Kingdom, where he was exiled again, but they encountered the same discrimination, “like everywhere in Europe,” she says. “In Canada, no one cares about the color of my skin, no one cares if you’re gypsy […]. We treat you like a human.”
She then allows herself to dream of what their return to Canada could have been like, in 2023, after a stay of several years in the United Kingdom: “I thought it would be good for our children, that we could rent a nice house and my husband could work” in his field, construction.
“But now I no longer have the choice to leave [with the children],” she resigns herself, letting out like a lament: “immigration did this to us by separating us.”
Adèle Surprenant is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter based at New Canadian Media.
Translated from French.
