Trump’s impending bans on refugees and immigrants triggers fears globally
By Sudarsan Raghavan,Louisa Loveluck and Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
January 26, 2017 at 8:06 am
CAIRO – A Trump administration draft executive order to start vetting potential immigrants and visitors, as well as institute bans on refugees seeking to resettle in the United States, will shatter countless dreams and divide families, according to would-be immigrants and human rights activists.
The draft order, expected to be signed as early as Thursday, calls for the immediate cessation of ongoing resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States, and rejecting visas for visitors and immigrant hopefuls based partly on their ideology and opinions.
A copy of the draft orders was leaked Wednesday to civil rights groups and obtained by the Washington Post.
“I feel devastated,” said Ibrahim Abu Ghanem, 37, a father of three in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, whose father and two brothers live in the United States. “This means all my future plans are going to go down the drain.”
If enacted, potential immigrants and visitors from seven Muslim countries – Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Iran, Libya and Sudan – considered by the Trump administration as nations whose citizens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” will be immediately affected.
For the next 30 days, they will not be allowed entry into the United States, even if they have visas and relatives who are U.S. citizens.
The order also calls for all admission and resettlement of refugees to be stopped for 120 days pending the review of vetting procedures. For Syrian refugees, the ban will remain in place until further notice.
Once restarted, annual refugee admissions from all nations would be halved, from its current level of 100,000 to 50,000.
For those affected, the fear is that the order will be a harbinger for even greater restrictions on the horizon for Muslim immigrants, refugees and visitors, fulfilling Trump’s campaign promises of “extreme vetting” of foreigners seeking entry into the U.S. and installing “a Muslim ban.”
“It’s going to be devastating,” said Denise Bell, senior campaigner for refugee and migrant rights for the watchdog group, Amnesty International. “Refugees are not a threat. They are the ones fleeing horrific violence. They are trying to rebuild their lives. They want the same safety and opportunities that any of us would want.”
“And so we are scapegoating them in the guise of national security. Instead, we are betraying our own values. We are violating international law,” she added.
Since Wednesday, as news of the impending order spread, lives were quickly disrupted across the world, particularly among the citizens of the countries immediately affected.
In Sanaa, Ghanem had been making plans to travel with his family to Cairo to apply for visas at the U.S. embassy. His mother and younger brother are also in Yemen. He wanted to reunite his family.
“My wife and I have spent countless nights dreaming of a better future for us and especially our children,” said Ghanem, a former administrator at a center for battling cancer.” We were hoping for a better life, better opportunities, and good education for our children.”
The shock for Syrian refugees already in the United States cut deepest for those awaiting the arrival of loved ones.
For Eman, a widow in Chicago who asked that her surname be withheld out of concern for family back home, that is her son.
They fled the western city of Homs in 2012, fearing he would be conscripted into President Bashar Assad’s military. Months after her own arrival in America, she had expected the eldest to arrive in short order, once paperwork for his new marriage was approved.
“It seemed like everything was fine and he was finally going to join me here. Now they tell me it might be impossible because of the president’s new decree,” she said. “I’m so scared. I came to America because I thought it would be best for my family.”
Syria’s bitter war has sparked the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon have absorbed more than four million displaced Syrians, spread across camps or living on meager resources in cramped apartments. In comparison, the United States accepted less than 13,000 last year, a figure that only rose in the final months after tight vetting procedures initially stemmed the monthly flow to the low hundreds.
“We have to remember these people are escaping the very same terrorism that Trump says he’s banning them for,” said Suzanne Akhras Sahloul, founder of the Syrian Community Network, a grass-roots initiative that has stepped in to fill the linguistic and cultural gaps that larger relief agencies are unable to address.
Refugee advocates say the resettlement of Syrians presents challenges unusual in the United States, even among new refugees. Doctors in Chicago discovered that some Syrians still carried shrapnel in their bodies. Less visible but more pervasive is the trauma. Many have been tortured or lived amid constant bombardment.
In the world’s largest refugee camp, called Dadaab, near the Kenya-Somalia border, news of Trump’s impending announcement spread quickly.
“You could see the sadness on people’s faces,” said Mohammed Rashid, an English teacher who has been waiting for five years for his asylum case to be approved.
Between 2001 and 2015, the U.S. admitted more than 90,000 Somali refugees, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. Many of them came from Dadaab, where generations of Somalis first fled civil war and then Islamic extremist groups, often applying for asylum in the United States after arriving at the camp.
Rashid fled Somalia for Dadaab in 1992 to save his family from the country’s civil war.
“We thought our children would have better lives in the U.S.,” said Rashid. “Now, with Trump, we are disappointed. There is nowhere else for us to go.”
Rashid sat for an interview with American resettlement officials in Kenya in 2015. His fingerprints were taken, but while waiting for his asylum to be approved, he and his wife had a third child, which he said delayed their approval.
After the election, he started following several Trump-related accounts on Twitter to keep abreast of American news. His brother had been resettled in Seattle several years earlier, and he already felt an attachment to the United States. In November, when a Somali-born student at Ohio State injured 11 people in an attack, Rashid read Trump’s tweet that the attacker was a “Somali refugee who should not have been in our country.”
On Wednesday, Rashid saw a tweet that said Somali refugees would be banned from the United States. He said he tried not to cry.
“The refugees are people who ran away, they are victims,” he said. “I don’t know why we are being targeted.”
In Sudan, many people were surprised to see their country on the list of affected countries. Earlier this month, the Obama administration relaxed longstanding sanctions on the country, and it appeared that relations between the two nations were warming. As part of the agreement to lift sanctions, Sudanese officials pledged to increase cooperation on combating terrorism.
In 2001, the United States accepted more than 4,000 so-called “Lost Boys” from Sudan, whose families were killed or vanished during the country’s civil war. Their stories were broadcast in dozens of books, movies and television reports. Some of them went on to careers as professional athletes, diplomats and renowned writers.
The United States later resettled a large number of refugees fleeing conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, where 3.3 million people are still in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.
Some Sudanese refugees in Cairo, have spent years in Egypt seeking resettlement to the United States and Europe. Now, there’s even less hope.
“I have been trying for four years, but all is in vain,” said Maher Ismail, 23, a university student. “Our conditions here are dire. It is very difficult to get anywhere, the U.S. or any other place.”
“I have applied for a lottery visa three months ago anyway, but I know how this is going to end up,” he added.
Ghanem believes that the attitude towards Muslim immigrants and visitors will only worsen in the United States is afraid his family will never be reunited.
“This decision has really destroyed our dreams,” he said. “I don’t know what I will say to my mother or how I would break the news for her.”
Loveluck reported from Beirut and Sieff from Nairobi. The Washington Post’s Ali Al Mujahed in Sanaa, Yemen, and Heba Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.