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NY Times, Jan. 28 2017
Trump’s Order Blocks Immigrants at Airports, Stoking Fear Around Globe
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and NICHOLAS KULISH
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s executive order on immigration quickly
reverberated through the United States and across the globe on Saturday,
slamming the border shut for an Iranian scientist headed to a lab in
Boston, an Iraqi who had worked as an interpreter for the United States
Army, and a Syrian refugee family headed to a new life in Ohio, among
countless others.
Around the nation, security officers at major international gateways had
new rules to follow. Humanitarian organizations scrambled to cancel
long-planned programs, delivering the bad news to families who were
about to travel. Refugees who were airborne on flights when the order
was signed were detained at airports.
Reports rapidly surfaced Saturday morning of students attending American
universities who were blocked from getting back into the United States
from visits abroad. One student said in a Twitter post that he would be
unable to study at Yale. Another who attends the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology was refused permission to board a plane. Stanford
University was reportedly working to help a Sudanese student return to
California.
Human rights groups reported that legal permanent residents of the
United States who hold green cards were being stopped in foreign
airports as they sought to return from funerals, vacations or study
abroad — a clear indication that Mr. Trump’s directive is being applied
broadly.
Mr. Trump’s order, enacted with the stroke of a pen on Friday afternoon,
suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days,
barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United
States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries:
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The Department of Homeland Security said that the executive order barred
green card holders from those countries from re-entering the United States.
At least one case quickly prompted a legal challenge as lawyers
representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy International Airport in
New York filed a motion early Saturday seeking to have their clients
released. They also filed a motion for class certification, in an effort
to represent all refugees and other immigrants who they said were being
unlawfully detained at ports of entry.
Shortly after noon on Saturday, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an interpreter
who worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq, was
released. After nearly 19 hours of detention, Mr. Darweesh began to cry
as he spoke to reporters, putting his hands behind his back and miming
handcuffs.
The other man the lawyers are representing, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq
Alshawi, remained in custody as his legal advocates sought his release.
Inside the airport, one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, a supervising
attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, asked a border
agent, “Who is the person we need to talk to?”
“Call Mr. Trump,” said the agent, who declined to identify himself.
The White House said the restrictions would protect “the United States
from foreign nationals entering from countries compromised by terrorism”
and ensure “a more rigorous vetting process.” But critics condemned Mr.
Trump over the immediate collateral damage imposed on people who, by all
accounts, had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States.
Peaceful protests began forming Saturday afternoon at Kennedy Airport,
where nine travelers had been detained at Terminal 7 upon arrival, and
two more were detained at Terminal 4, an airport official said.
The official said they were being held in a federal area of the airport,
adding that such situations were playing out around the nation.
An official message to all American diplomatic posts around the world
provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries
affected: “Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance
and printing” of visas to the United States.
Confusion turned to panic at airports around the world, as travelers
found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States. In
Dubai and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers
away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from
a flight they had boarded.
Seyed Soheil Saeedi Saravi, a leading young scientist in Iran, had been
scheduled to travel in the coming days to Boston, where he had been
awarded a fellowship to study cardiovascular medicine at Harvard,
according to Thomas Michel, the professor who was to supervise the
research fellowship.
“This outstanding young scientist has enormous potential to make
contributions that will improve our understanding of heart disease, and
he has already been thoroughly vetted,” Professor Michel wrote to The
New York Times. “This country and this city have a long history of
providing research training to the best young scientists in the world,
many of whom have stayed in the U.S.A. and made tremendous contributions
in biomedicine and other disciplines.”
A spokesman for the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities —
the association of large public colleges — said that the group was aware
of an Iranian undergraduate student who had been barred from boarding a
flight.
A Syrian family of six who have been living in a Turkish refugee camp
since fleeing their home in 2014 had been scheduled to arrive in
Cleveland on Tuesday, according to a report in The Cleveland Plain
Dealer. Instead, the family’s trip has been called off.
Danielle Drake, a community relations manager at US Together, a refugee
resettlement agency, told the newspaper that Mr. Trump’s ban reminded
her of when the United States turned away Jewish refugees during World
War II. “All those times that people said, ‘Never again,’ well, we’re
doing it again,” she said.
On Twitter, Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy, posted an angry message for Mr. Trump after the executive
order stopped the arrival of a Syrian family his synagogue had sponsored.
In an interview on Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, he
expressed sorrow for the fate of the family and apologized for cursing
in his Twitter message.
“I can’t quite describe the degree of anger that I felt as a reaction to
this, which then caused me to curse at the president on social media,”
he said, adding, “which is probably something I should not do as a
general rule.”
It was unclear how many refugees and other immigrants were being held
nationwide in relation to the executive order.
A Christian family of six from Syria said in an email to Representative
Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, that they were being detained
at Philadelphia International Airport on Saturday morning despite having
legal paperwork, green cards and visas that had been approved.
In the case of the two Iraqis held at Kennedy Airport, the legal filings
by his lawyers say that Mr. Darweesh was granted a special immigrant
visa on Jan. 20, the same day Mr. Trump was sworn in as president. Mr.
Darweesh worked with the Americans in Iraq in a variety of jobs — as an
interpreter, an engineer and a contractor.
He worked as an interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in
Baghdad and Mosul starting shortly after the invasion of Iraq on April
1, 2003. The filing said he had been directly targeted twice for his
work with the United States military.
A husband and father of three, he arrived at Kennedy Airport with his
family. Mr. Darweesh’s wife and children made it through passport
control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection
detained him.
Mr. Alshawi was supposed to be reunited with his wife, who has been
living in Texas. She wiped away tears as she waited in her sister’s
house early Saturday in a Houston suburb.
In Cairo on Saturday, five Iraqis and one Yemeni, all of whom had valid
immigration visas, according to airport officials, were barred from
boarding an EgyptAir flight headed to New York, The Associated Press
reported.
It was not clear if any of the six passengers had already been granted
refugee status.
In Istanbul, during a stopover on Saturday, passengers reported that
security officers had entered a plane after everyone had boarded and
ordered a young Iranian woman and her family to leave the aircraft.
Iranian green card holders who live in the United States were blindsided
by the decree while on vacation in Iran, finding themselves in a legal
limbo and unsure whether they would be able to return to America.
“How do I get back home now?” said Daria Zeynalia, a green card holder
who was visiting family in Iran. He had rented a house and leased a car,
and would be eligible for citizenship in November. “What about my job?
If I can’t go back soon, I’ll lose everything.”
Shadi Heidarifar, a philosophy student recently admitted to New York
University, said in a message on Twitter that she had spent three years
applying to universities in the United States.
“I had to work to save money, gather documents. The application fees
were so expensive that a whole family could live for a month” on them,
Ms. Heidarifar wrote. When she was accepted recently, she was elated.
“But now my entire future is destroyed in one second.”
Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, and Nicholas Kulish from New
York. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti from Washington, Thomas
Erdbrink from Tehran, Manny Fernandez from Houston, and Russell Goldman,
Stephanie Saul and Alan Feuer from New York.
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