Lesbian couple banned from fostering migrant children because their marriage isn't 'holy' [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

When Bryn Esplin and Fatma Marouf heard about the wretched conditions at the Trump administration’s concentration camps for children, they knew they had enough love to share. They approached a local child welfare agency and offered to foster refugee children, but were turned away for the most insulting reason possible.

The Catholic-run agency told them that their marriage isn’t “holy” and refused to work with them to help get children out of the overcrowded government centers where some are kept in cages and medical care is practically nonexistent. The program is funded by the federal government.

“We were really open in terms of taking in a sibling set, in terms of age of the child—we didn’t really have any specific thing we were looking for,” Marouf told The Daily Beast. “We just felt like we could provide a good home, and there were hundreds of kids needing it in this area, so it just seemed like something we could do.”


“They showed us where the kids were living in their offices, and it just looked very sad,” Marouf said. “I thought, this could be a good opportunity for us to try to foster a child, and it fit really well, it seemed, with my interests in immigration and refugee law, and my experience… I’m familiar with the culture and religion of some of those places, and we just thought it would be a good fit for us.”

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