During Friday night’s “Presidential Family Forum” in Iowa, Mike Huckabee attempted to gin up outrage among the conservative Christian audience by falsely claiming that the federal government is working to deport a family from Germany who have sought asylum in America in order to homeschool their children.
Homeschooling is illegal in Germany and in 2010, the Romeike family sought political asylum in America, arguing that they would face fines, imprisonment and loss of custody of their children if they were deported back to Germany. The case worked its way through the legal system for years until the Supreme Court finally refused to grant their appeal, only for the Department of Homeland Security to announce in 2014 that the Romeikes would be granted “indefinite deferred action status” and be allowed to remain in America.
But that is not the story Huckabee told during a discussion of education at the forum on Friday night. Instead, the former Arkansas governor declared that “every Christian believer in this country [should be] absolutely livid” over the fact that “this week, the Justice Department of the United States started deportation process against the Romeike family to send them back to Germany, which will take their kids from them.”
“The very week the president wants to bring Syrian refugees to America and import them,” Huckabee stated, “he wants to deport a Christian family.”
Such an action, Huckabee insisted, is proof that “there is a war on the Christian faith in this country that is being carried out by this administration.”
Given that the case of the Romeike family has been an important issue for the Religious Right for years, one would think that if the government had reneged on its pledge to allow them to remain in the country and begun the process of deporting them, that might have made some news.
But we have been utterly unable to find a single news article reporting this or a single piece of evidence to back up Huckabee’s claim. We even called the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been representing the Romeike family from the beginning, to ask if their organization had any knowledge of this and were informed that HSLDA is unaware of any steps taken by the DOJ to deport its clients.
