Trump’s Executive Order Is Already Hurting Refugees, Muslims And Families
People are being turned away at airports.
WASHINGTON
― President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Muslims and
refugees led to chaos in the hours after he signed it, as refugees and
immigrants arrived at U.S. airports only to be detained or told they
couldn’t enter the country and businesses had to scramble to adjust to
the new policy.
“We are hearing that last night a lot
of people were turned away,” said Abed Ayoub, legal director of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “It’s had a direct impact
on a lot of people.”
The order, which Trump signed Friday afternoon,
bans Syrian refugee resettlement in the U.S. indefinitely, shuts down
the entire refugee program for 120 days and bars all immigrants and
visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.
Coming
in the late hours of Friday, and with little apparent consultation with
other agencies and groups prior to its publication, the order created
havoc and confusion among those tasked with overseeing entry into the
country.
In
the hours after the president signed his executive order, government
authorities detained two Iraqis at New York’s Kennedy Airport, The New York Times reported.
One of the men, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, worked for the U.S. government
for 10 years as an interpreter. He was detained upon landing at Kennedy
on Friday night, but his wife and children were let through, a former
colleague of Darweesh’s told The Huffington Post. Darweesh was released the following day.
The other detained man,
Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the country to join his child
and wife, who had worked for a U.S. government contractor, The Washington Post reported.
Lawyers for the two men told CNN they have filed a lawsuit
against the president and the government over their detention. The
action in federal court seeks a writ of habeas corpus — an order
declaring their detention illegal — and the certification of a class
action covering any immigrants and refugees denied admission at ports of
entry across the country, according to the complaint filed in New York.
Google, meanwhile, told traveling staff members to come back to the U.S., BBC News reported.
And
refugee organizations began notifying volunteers that the families they
planned to help were no longer on their way. Alisa Wartick, 36, said
she and a group of 38 people in her neighborhood had co-sponsored a
Syrian refugee family through the organization Refugee One in Chicago.
The
family ― a mother, father and 16-month-old daughter ― was supposed to
arrive on Monday to join the woman’s parents and siblings. The
co-sponsorship group had already furnished their apartment, and met the
family via FaceTIme so they could see their new home, which they now may
never see again.
“Just
imagining raising a child in a refugee camp environment and then being
told you could see your family again, you could be reunited with your
mom and your daughter’s grandma and being told ‘No, sorry, you’re three
days too late for that’ ― I can’t imagine what that’s like,” Wartick
said.
Church World
Service, one of the organizations that handles refugee resettlement, had
been planning to welcome 212 refugees next week, 164 of them joining
family members already in the United States, according to a spokeswoman.
Those 212 refugees are no longer expected to arrive.
Though Trump, on
the campaign trail, had pledged to stop refugees from certain
Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, there was
some skepticism that he would actually follow through on the proposal.
Business groups had warned against it, as did religious organizations,
including some with traditionally conservative political leanings.
Moreover,
congressional Republicans spoke out over the summer against any policy
that would bar people from entering the United States based on their
religion. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was one of those critics. But
on Friday evening, he offered a statement of support for Trump’s
proposal.
The ripple effects of the
executive order make clear the difficulty in taking a blunt campaign
promise and applying it to real-world governance, with seemingly
unforeseen outcomes and immediate, frightening disruption in people’s
lives. People took to Twitter to share the uncertainty now surrounding
their Syrian colleagues and friends.
In other cases,
people who made it to safety in the United States are now having trouble
meeting family members from their home countries. Mohammed Al Rawi, who
risked his life working for the Los Angeles Times bureau
in Baghdad, moved to Long Beach, California, in 2010. His 71-year-old
father was leaving Qatar to fly to Los Angeles to visit him Friday night when a U.S. official stopped him and informed him that Trump had “canceled all visas,” Al Rawi wrote on Facebook.
U.S. officials
then detained Al Rawi’s father in an unknown location and confiscated
his passport, making it impossible for Al Rawi to book him a hotel in
Qatar to sleep for the night, he said. His father’s phone died, so he
has not been able to get in touch.
Meathaq, 45, and
Mahmoud, 49, of Baghdad just arrived in Knoxville, Tennessee, in August
with their 5-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter. But they have twin
18-year-old daughters still living in Iraq.
Thanks to
Mahmoud’s work as a translator for the U.S. Army, they were able to get a
special immigrant visa. The process for approving their visas took four
years, beginning when they first applied in 2012. By that time their
daughters were over 18, which meant the U.S. government required greater
processing. Now the twins are stuck in Baghdad, and their parents fear
they will not be able to reunite with them. (Both Meathaq and Mahmoud
withheld their last names out of concern for their twin daughters’
safety.)
“I am crying all
the time, especially after the new law from President Trump,” Meathaq
said. “I miss them and the situation in Iraq is so bad and I don’t know
what to do to help.”
Even
the film industry has felt the impact. The executive order will prevent
Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi from traveling to the Oscars
ceremony next month. Farhadi’s “The Salesman” was nominated in the Best
Foreign Language Film category this year. Farhadi became the first
Iranian director to win an Oscar in that category in 2012. Iranian
actress Taraneh Alidoosti, a co-lead in “The Salesman,” said this week
that she would boycott the Oscars over the visa ban.
Trita Parsi,
president of the National Iranian American Council, shared several
stories on Twitter of individuals affected by the ban, including people
with green cards to be in the U.S. The Huffington Post is working to
verify those stories.
Zane Shami, a naturalized
U.S. citizen who has lived in the U.S. for over two decades, said he’d
been expecting his mother, who is 67, to arrive to live with him on Feb.
7.
Shami’s mother was born in
Syria but has been living in Kuwait, where Shami was born and where his
siblings live, since the civil war in her native country leveled her
town. She was approved to come to the U.S. as a refugee after extensive
vetting, Shami said. But now she’s unable to move here as planned, or
even to visit.
“I’ve done everything right.
I did the checklist,” Shami said. “There’s no reason my mom can’t come
here. It’s very un-American to say that we’re going to ban her just
because she has a Syrian passport. That doesn’t sound American to me.”
NBC Philadelphia reported that two Syrian families were blocked from entering the United States in Philadelphia and were sent back on a flight home.
Ayoub
said there has been confusion over whether the executive order applies
to people who hold green cards, and that some have been detained for
hours before being released.
ProPublica reports that the order’s language could lead to 500,000 green card holders, also called legal permanent residents, being unable to enter the United States to return to their homes.
Nashwan Abdullah, 25, of
Damascus, Syria, is on track to finish his master’s degree in music
performance at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in May. Now that Trump
has banned immigration from Syria, Abdullah’s not sure if he’ll be able
to stay. He had been hoping to apply for a 12-month work visa available
to foreign students, but does not know if this is possible any longer.
Abdullah is sure, however,
that he will not return to Syria. He does not want to be drafted into
the Syrian military, or deal with the danger and scarcities of basic
necessities in the Syrian capital.
“Of course I am afraid to go back. It’s a war zone. It’s an unsafe, bad situation,” he said.
There is one glimmer of hope for Abdullah: He is Catholic, so he is not sure if the ban is “going to include me or not.”
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Keep in mind, just because you have a green card or "Your Papers!", as the Nazis would say, doesn't mean you are safe.
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