Bring Jacob Le Home: Help a Mother Reunite with Her Toddler

On February 1, 2024, my three-year-old son, Jacob, left my care to travel to Vietnam with his father. That moment is seared into my memory: Jacob glanced back, waved, and said, “Bye Mom, I’ll call you.” His father’s demeanour that day worried me—I knew, deep in my heart, that he intended to take Jacob away for good.

That was the last time I was allowed to speak to my son.

Since then, each morning has started with the same emptiness. Each night has ended in fear, doubt, and helplessness. Every single day without Jacob has been a torture.

My son was taken from me through the Superior Court of Ontario. Taken under the pretext of a temporary trip. Taken across borders, away from his home, his routine, and most painfully away from the arms of his mother. Since that day, I have not been permitted to speak to him. Not once.

This was not a miscommunication but a deliberate, brutal severing of a child from his mother. A Canadian toddler, ripped from the only life he knew, and now unlawfully held in another country, his care handed over to strangers for much of his days. People who never held him through a fever. Who never soothed his cries in the night. Who never earned his trust. And yet now they presume to take my place.

This is state-enabled erasure. A mother erased. A bond destroyed. A child exiled—not by war, not by disaster—but by one man’s decision and a system too cowardly, too corrupt, to stop it.

As if biology absolves one of accountability, and as if motherhood carries no legal or moral weight. But love is not lesser when it is maternal. And a child's loss is no less profound because it happens quietly, in the shadow of bureaucracy.

I write today not only as a mother who has been denied her child, but as a witness to the limitations of our legal systems, systems which too often lack the urgency and resolve these cases demand.

I will continue to fight—for my son, for justice, and for the right of every parent to be protected by the very institutions that claim to serve them. The cost of inaction is not abstract. It is a little boy who misses his mother, and a mother whose world has been shattered.

I want my child returned.

I want his voice restored.

And I want the world to treat the abduction of a child not as collateral damage but as the human rights emergency it truly is.

I think of Jacob constantly. His laugh, his little feet padding across the floor in the morning, the way he wrapped his arms around my neck when he was tired or needed comfort. I think of how he used to sing to himself when he played, and how he would ask me to wipe his tears when he cries with the blanket his father refused to let me send. I now know why for sure, because, his blanket would have helped him remember me …

He is not just a name in a legal case. He is a child, with a favourite snack, a favourite book, a favorite lullaby. And for 483 days, I have been denied the chance to care for him, to protect him, to simply be his mother.

There is no peace in that kind of absence. Only an endless ache. A silence where his voice should be. A hundred small joys stolen, not just from me—but from him.

This isn't just about my loss—this is Jacob’s loss, too. He has been deprived of his mother’s presence, her love, her protection. He has been cut off from half of his world, and from the stability every child deserves.

I am currently raising funds to support international advocacy and the critical resources needed to secure Jacob’s safe return. Every contribution directly supports the fight to uphold his fundamental right to grow up with the love and care of his mother.