The day before they were set to be deported back to Hungary, a Montreal mother and daughter learned they can stay for another two months.
Katalin Lakatos and her daughter Gilda, 17, were supposed to be deported on Thursday but have instead been granted an extension.
Lakatos’s husband and son were deported after being stopped by police during a routine traffic stop on their way to work two months ago. Police found out the two Hungarian men, members of the Roma minority, had been living in Canada illegally after their claim for refugee status was denied.
Within two weeks, they were sent back to Hungary, where the Roma face widespread racism and discrimination.
Lakatos and her daughter turned themselves in to authorities and were scheduled to be deported Thursday. The two had made a last-minute plea to the Canadian government to stay until their application to remain here on humanitarian grounds is heard.
They were granted another two months on Wednesday.
“At first I was in shock. I didn’t believe it. And then I felt a great sense of relief,” Lakatos said in a statement issued by Solidarity Across Borders on Thursday. “But I wish all the insecurity was over, that the government had told us we stay for good. Then I would be able to breathe freely.”
The family says it left Hungary in 2011 after being subject to police harassment for years.
In the statement, Mary Foster of Solidarity Across Borders said the government hasn’t done much more than condemn Lakatos and her daughter to “another two months of stress and waiting.”
“This family has suffered too much, we demand that the government accept them immediately and reunite their family,” Foster said.
This week, a spokesperson in Immigration Minister John McCallum’s office told the Montreal Gazette that McCallum would not comment on specific cases.
