Hiwet and her two sons, Eritrea

Hiwet arrived in Denmark alone and was granted asylum in 2015. Her two sons were 14 and 16 years old at the time. They were living in Ethiopia, where she had lost contact with them for a period of time. Hiwet's husband was killed when the youngest was 2 years old.
 
Like many young people in Eritrea, her eldest son had fled to Ethiopia alone at the age of 14 to avoid military service, without Hiwet's permission. Later, the younger brother had also fled, and the two brothers luckily found one another in a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
 
Hiwet applied for family reunification for both of her sons as soon as she could, but permission was only granted for the youngest and the application for the eldest was rejected – the Danish Immigration Service believed that, since he had fled alone and he was 16 at the time of the application and would turn 18 six months after the decision was made, "it must be presumed that he is able to take care of himself".
 
Refugees Welcome appealed to the Immigration Appeals Board, which, after another 2 years of case processing, ruled in our favour: the older brother had the right to be reunited with his mother and younger brother in Denmark. They had the right to continue their family life, which had been involuntarily interrupted. We have later referred to this decision in other cases where a child had turned 18 during the processing, one of them was Asia from Afghanistan.

During the long wait, Hiwet suffered from stress and poor mental health, but after the reunion she quickly blossomed. She has worked full-time in recent years as a chef at an Eritrean restaurant in Nørrebo, Copenhagen.