They wake up, the four of them, in a small living room in a damp old house on a nearly deserted street in Bosnia. The two girls sleep on the sofas. The parents sleep on the floor.
They live with the woman who owns the house. She’s 90 and has dementia. A couple of years ago someone broke into the house and robbed and beat her.
While they feel trapped inside — longing for what they had in a modest townhome in St. Johns County — they don’t feel safe outside. Not far from the house, a red sign warns of a minefield. And the other day at a coffee shop a sniper shot a man in the chest.
“We all are like in a movie,” Amra Blekic said in an email. “We cannot believe what is happening, even now after almost seven weeks.”
Just a few months ago her youngest, Medina, was wearing a JROTC uniform, singing the national anthem during Military Appreciation Day at The Players Championship, belting out the line about the home of the brave. It’s the only home Medina ever really knew, the one she wanted to serve by joining the Navy.
READ MORE: First Coast family at risk of being deported
They owned and operated a janitorial business. Amra managed a fast-food restaurant. Their oldest daughter, Jenny, who also participated in JROTC at Nease, had started college and gotten married. They had a Chihuahua named Bobby.
In short, they were living the American dream, except for one key piece, something they spent a decade trying to make happen. Becoming Americans.
Elvir grew up in Bosnia but left in the early 1990s and met Amra, who grew up in Germany. His parents and two brothers came to America during Bosnia’s civil war, applied for asylum and became U.S. citizens. In 2008, Elvir and Amra decided to follow that path with their two young girls. They entered America legally and applied for asylum.
For years they were here legally, yet in limbo. Working, paying taxes, going to school. When a judge denied their asylum about four years ago, basically saying it was safe to go back to Bosnia, they became illegal immigrants.
Yet even then, they had a way to continue with their life here — an order of supervision and repeated stays of removal — as long as they stayed out of trouble. Which they did.
Last year, though, their stay of removal was denied. They were told by Immigration and Custom Enforcement they could be here until Medina graduated from high school. They then had to leave.
They bought plane tickets for June 25. On that day, a judge granted them another stay of removal. Two hours after the plane took off. Two hours too late.
When they landed, they couldn’t just turn back around.
They hope their case will be reopened. If that happens, they will be able to get a visa, return to America — to Jenny’s husband, to the dog Bobby (being watched by another JROTC family), to Medina’s plans, to all of their hopes of green cards and citizenship.
“If they don’t agree to open the case, then we will never see America our home again,” Amra wrote.
You may recall that I wrote about Medina and her family before they were deported. I’ve been trading emails with her mother in recent weeks. I wanted to know what happened to them after they were deported, where they ended up, how they are doing.
Amra’s emails are punctuated with emojis. A face with a frown and a tear, a dog face, a four-leaf clover, praying hands. Mostly, though, the face with a tear.
“One moment we cry, the other we are OK,” she said. “We have more downs than ups. And it goes one by one. We don’t cry together.”
She says that the girls are “completely lost.” At least Jenny talks to them about it. Talks about missing her husband.
“But Medina is not good,” she wrote. “She is very depressed.”
These days Medina’s friends are heading off to college, joining the military, starting new jobs. She wanted to go to the University of Miami, wanted to become a Navy anesthesiologist. Instead, she’s in a country where she doesn’t speak the language, a town where it’s hard for her to even picture any kind of future.
Her father, Amra says, is all over the place. He says he doesn’t even recognize the place where he grew up.
“He carries the whole burden because what happened to us and what he did to the girls,” Amra wrote. “Now when they should have their best life ever, they are here in a small town where the people are scary. Actually, there are no people at all.”
She says there are only three houses on the street with people living in them. The rest were damaged in the war and abandoned. The people who used to live there left the country, starting new lives elsewhere. And yet somehow this family of four — three of whom never set foot in Bosnia before — ended up here.
She sends photos. One is of the room where they sleep, another of the sign about the minefield, another a photo of city hall, an officer with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“They take you in one by one and touch you,” she wrote.
They’ve already learned, while getting new passports, that everything requires a bribe. You’re told that something will take in two to three months. But with some money under the table, you can get it in two to three days.
They have their passports. They hope to use them to return to America. But in the meantime, they’re preparing for winter in a house with an old wood stove, no warm water, sporadic electricity and an aging septic system.
She says she has to be strong for her family. But there are times when nobody can see her — when she’s in the bathroom, or maybe under a blanket at night — when she breaks down and cries.
he sends one email that ends simply: “Please help.”
When they were in America, they didn’t ask for help. They were examples of the classic immigrant story. Working incredibly hard, doing jobs others didn’t want to do, starting businesses, building a better life, being grateful for the opportunities in this country.
Even when they were facing deportation, paying for plane tickets and all kinds of other expenses, they didn’t ask for money. Another JROTC mother, Angie Aycock Filipsic, ended up asking for them, setting up a GoFundMe page.
About $8,000 was raised. That’s long gone. And now the desperation comes through in Amra’s emails. She asks for help. They need to buy wood for the winter. They need a freezer, because once vegetables are out of season they’re ridiculously expensive. They need, she says, to get out of this place.
“Praying for a fast return to our home,” she wrote at the end of one email.
She punctuated that with a four-leaf clover, praying hands and the face with a tear.