This Father’s Day marks almost 15 years since I have last seen my children in person. I fled Sudan in 2007, when my daughter was just an infant and my son was 2 years old. My family lived in Darfur, where for several years we had witnessed violence grow into the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab people by the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed, an armed militia group. During this time, young Darfuri men started disappearing. It became too dangerous for me to stay. But the journey to safety was too difficult for my young family to take together. I had only a few precious moments with them before I fled to seek a better life for all of us.

In 2016, I resettled as a refugee in the Baltimore area. With the assistance of the International Rescue Committee, I petitioned the U.S. government to bring my wife and children to join me through its “follow-to-join” process, a program that allows refugees to petition to be reunified with a spouse or child who remains overseas. Nearly five years later, I’m still awaiting a decision.

Meanwhile, my family is stranded in Sudan. During the years of conflict in Darfur, my wife’s father was killed in front of her, and my mother was killed while traveling to accompany my wife back from giving birth at my wife’s family’s home. The last time I saw my wife and children was after they had fled to a refugee camp in Al-Fashir.

They currently live in the northern town of New Halfa, near Sudan’s border with Eritrea and Ethiopia. I worry about them constantly — this region is suffering a lot of conflict. Flooding of the Atbara River in August destroyed the room my family was sharing, so they now live in a tent, in dire conditions.

It’s hard for me to send them money because for years the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the capital, has been holding their identification documents — necessary for them to claim any money I send — to process their follow-to-join petitions. Everything in Sudan is expensive, especially where my family lives, because of the conflict in Tigray. One week ago, I purchased a bag of wheat for my family for 30,000 pounds (roughly $70); the last time it cost $25. And the daily limits on Western Union transfers make it difficult for me to send my family enough.

The phone network in their area is poor, so we can hardly ever see each other on video calls, even though I try to speak to them almost every day. I feel helpless that I can’t protect and care for them, and I don’t understand why we’ve had to endure such a long, painful separation.

Like ours, thousands of families’ lives have been put on hold because of delays in the follow-to-join process. According to the International Refugee Assistance Project, the Trump administration created so many hurdles and delays that fewer and fewer refugee families have been able to reunite in the United

States. And the number of unreasonably delayed cases is only growing.

We were hopeful that under a new, more welcoming Biden administration, the process would improve. But so far nothing has changed.

My family has sacrificed money, time and opportunities to overcome every new obstacle thrown at us in the follow-to-join process. Many times, my wife and children have made the long, dangerous journey to Khartoum, where the U.S. Embassy is located, for yet another processing appointment. Each time, the bus leaves at 4 a.m. and does not arrive until the next day at 4 a.m. The tickets used to cost me $7 per person; now they cost $25 per person. Each time, my children miss important hours in school, and I fear this means they’ll lose out on future opportunities.

I work hard at Amazon so I can pay for my family to complete — and sometimes repeat — application requirements as the process drags on. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.)

In the years since I last saw my children, their physical appearance has changed so significantly, they had to take updated passport photos. In October, I filed a case in federal court in Baltimore, hoping to put an end to the government’s delays in processing my family’s petitions. We’re still awaiting a decision.

This year, on the day when Father’s Day and World Refugee Day coincide, I think about the time I have lost with my children and the time they have lost with me. I hope President Joe Biden will fix the follow-to-join process and ensure this is the last Father’s Day we are forced to spend apart.