The Justice Ministry’s Appeals Tribunal has ordered the deportation within six weeks of 14 children who were born in Israel to foreign nationals, together with their immediate families.

The tribunal, which deals with personal status and residency issues, last week denied an appeal to revoke Interior Minister Arye Dery’s decision from April, denying the children residency in Israel.

The children, who are now 11, had been deemed ineligible for residency on the basis of a cabinet resolution passed in August 2010, because they were only in kindergarten at the time, not first grade.

The Interior Ministry refused residency requests for children in a similar situation but later reversed its decision. The parents of the 14 children now facing deportation said they didn’t submit residency applications at the time because they knew they would be rejected.

Other parents, who did apply for residency and were refused by the ministry, appealed to the Jerusalem Appeals Court. Eventually the ministry changed its position and granted the children permanent residency and their families’ temporary residency.

However, the ministry refuses to grant the same status to the 14 children, whose families didn’t submit residency requests on time. Last week the court ratified the ministry’s decision.

The ruling means deporting 35 people — the 14 children and 21 family members. All the mothers and most of the fathers are from the Philippines. A number of the fathers are migrant workers from Turkey and Thailand. All but two of the men either left Israel voluntarily or were deported.

The mothers entered Israel with work visas and worked as home health aides. Each lost her visa for various reasons, such as the employer’s death or their own pregnancies, but remained in Israel.

“The appellants can only blame themselves for not requesting residency in time, for whatever reason,” wrote tribunal head Judge Menahem Pashititzky in his ruling.

He also wrote that the appellants’ case was no different from other cases in which foreign workers’ children’s requests for residency were denied. Pashititzky levied 10,000 shekels ($2,500) for court expenses on the appellants.

Open gallery view The children, and their families, who face deportation in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park, November 16, 2016. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

“I feel really bad,” says Revital, one of the 14. “I was born here and have lots of friends here. I don’t want to go to the Philippines. Here I feel I belong. I feel much more Israeli than Philippine.”

“I was born here, this feels like home,” a second girl, Joanna, told Haaretz. “I want to stay here because I don’t want to leave my friends and family in Israel. I understand Hebrew better, it’s easier for me here.”

Daniel is also afraid of being deported. “I want to stay here,” he says. “In the Philippines I don’t know the language. Israel is my home. My life here is good.”

In August 2010 the cabinet set conditions for giving foreign workers’ children and their families residence. They would be eligible for residence if the child went to an Israeli school in the 2009-10 school year and registered for first grade or above the following year; lived in Israel for at least five consecutive years, and entered the country before his or her 13th birthday. In addition, the child must speak Hebrew and the parents must have had valid work, tourist or volunteer visas before the child’s birth or entry into Israel.

Children who fulfilled these criteria were entitled to permanent residency, while their parents and siblings were eligible for temporary residency. The cabinet said “marginal cases” would be examined on an individual basis and that no requests submitted after the specified date would be granted.

The individuals were given only three weeks to apply for residency. Of the 700 requests that were submitted, 85 were rejected out of hand, including those of children who had started kindergarten.

Attorney Osnat Lifshitz, Head of the Migrants Rights Clinic at the College for Law and Business in Ramat Gan, said in the appeal she filed that she knew of at least 16 children in preschool whose requests were rejected immediately.

“The message was that it was pointless to ask and it was understood well by the appealing parents. They refrained from submitting a request, knowing it would be dismissed out of hand.”

Following legal procedures, the Immigration Authority agreed to reconsider requests of kindergarten children who had been denied and in 2014 they were granted residence. In March 2014 the parents of the children now facing deportation asked then-Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar to grant them residence, but he refused.

They asked him to reconsider and in April this year Interior Minister Arye Dery denied their request again, saying the elapsed time and the children’s integration in Israeli society weren’t sufficient “humanitarian” considerations to justify granting them residence.

The appeal says each of the boys and girls is Israeli through and through, they were all born in Israel and have never been out of it. They all go to state schools, most of them from nursery school. “One sentence they say is enough to show how fluent they are in Hebrew and how Israeli culture and society formed their character,” the appeal says.

“For these reasons their life is filled with dread from the day they’d be deported from here and forced to leave everything they know and love,” it says.