Barred from US underneath Trump, Muslims exult in Biden’s open door

Written by Declan Walsh
As the outcomes of the U.S. presidential election rolled in Nov. 4, a younger Sudanese couple sat up by means of the evening of their small city south of Khartoum, eyes glued to the tv as state tallies had been declared, watching anxiously. They had quite a bit driving on the end result.
A 12 months earlier, Monzir Hashim had received the State Department’s annual lottery to acquire a inexperienced card for the United States, solely to study that then-President Donald Trump, in his newest iteration of the “Muslim ban,” had barred Sudanese residents from immigrating to the United States.
The election appeared to supply a second likelihood, and when Trump was finally declared to have misplaced the vote, Hashim and his spouse, Alaa Jamal, hugged with pleasure and erupted in wedding-style ululations.
But the couple had been on a knife’s edge for the following 11 weeks as fraud allegations, authorized challenges and the mob assault on the Capitol appeared to cloud the outcomes. Jamal, compulsively checking Facebook, needed to cease herself. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she mentioned.
She dared to look Wednesday when President Joe Biden, hours after being sworn in, rescinded all the raft of Trump-era orders that had blocked folks the world over — principally Muslims like herself — from coming into the United States. She wept with pleasure.
President Joe Biden and first woman Jill Biden after his inauguration, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 20, 2021. (The New York Times/File)
“Finally, happiness,” she mentioned over the telephone. “Now we start planning again.”
Few foreigners welcomed Biden’s election victory as enthusiastically because the tens of hundreds of Muslims who’ve been locked out of the United States for the previous 4 years because of the Trump-era immigration restrictions popularly referred to as the “Muslim ban.”
By one depend, 42,000 folks had been prevented from coming into the United States from 2017 to 2019, principally from Muslim-majority nations like Iran, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. Immigrant visas issued to residents of these nations fell by as much as 79% over the identical interval.
But the human value of Trump’s measures, stitched into the material of disrupted lives stained with tears and even blood, can hardly be counted — households separated for years, weddings and funerals missed, careers and research plans upended, lifesaving operations that didn’t happen.
Then there’s the injury to America’s fame from a coverage considered by some nations as similar to the worst stains of recent U.S. historical past, just like the CIA’s torture chambers, the abuses at Abu Ghraib jail and the internment of Japanese Americans throughout World War II.
Biden mentioned in his order revoking the restrictions that Trump’s measures — a lattice of 1 govt order and three presidential proclamations whose acknowledged purpose was to maintain terrorists out — undermined U.S. safety, jeopardized its world alliances and introduced “a moral blight that has dulled the power of our example the world over.”
For some, the reversal merely got here too late.
Negar Rahmani had deliberate to take a seat out the Trump presidency. After the primary immigration directive in January 2017 focused her nation, Iran, Rahmani, a graduate scholar of neuroscience on the University of Rhode Island, put aside plans to return dwelling. She urged her dad and mom to make do with video calls till a brand new American president had been elected.
But then the pandemic struck, and in November, Rahmani’s 56-year-old mom in Iran was hospitalized with COVID-19, leaving her daughter with an agonizing dilemma. If Rahmani, 26, flew dwelling, she risked being shut out of the United States for good. But her mom’s situation was deteriorating quickly.
Torn, she wavered for 2 weeks till the illness intervened, and her mom died.
Now Rahmani is wracked by totally different emotions, she mentioned in an interview: remorse at not going dwelling whereas her mom was alive and a deep contempt for Trump and the immense ache his coverage had brought on her.
“I feel like I have been in a cage for four years,” she mentioned, breaking into sobs. “I could have gone back every summer. My mom could have visited me. I feel the travel ban in my bones and skin.”
Other tales of damaged hearts and dashed desires are scattered throughout the Middle East and Africa, principally in its most susceptible and war-torn corners.
A Syrian dentist, Dr. Abdulaziz al-Lahham, was refused permission to go to his American spouse in New York after an in any other case pleasant American consular officer noticed his passport. “His face totally dropped, simply because I’m Syrian,” mentioned al-Lahham, 31.
A Somali refugee, Muhyadin Hassan Noor, was stranded together with his spouse and 6 kids at a dust-blown camp in northeastern Kenya regardless of having approval to resettle in Minnesota since 2017. “We were treated in a way that wasn’t right,” mentioned Noor, 53.
Then there’s Shawki Ahmed, a Yemeni-born New York City police officer who struggled for 3 years to get his spouse and youngsters out of Yemen, a rustic in a hellish civil battle, to the household dwelling in Jamaica, Queens. “You’re a police officer. You’re out there risking your life, yet you don’t know what’s going on with your kid,” mentioned Ahmed, 40.
The household finally acquired permission to return to America in October, however the sting of injustice lingered. “Trump betrayed so many law-abiding citizens based on their religion and their last name,” Ahmed mentioned.
By the tip, after greater than 100 courtroom challenges and a number of other iterations, Trump’s “Muslim ban” had develop into an African one, too. It barred entry to most residents from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen; halted immigration from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria; restricted chosen folks in Tanzania; and included Venezuela, too.
The ban was upheld within the Supreme Court, which mentioned that regardless of the president’s incendiary phrases about Muslims, the ban was justified as an anti-terrorism coverage. But the ruling got here with a searing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who likened it to the 1944 Korematsu v. United States resolution that upheld the detention of Japanese Americans throughout World War II.

Since the doorways had been flung open this previous week, many potential guests have been selecting up the items to strive once more. A journey agent in Libya mentioned there had been a sudden curiosity in U.S. visa purposes. In Nigeria the Biden election will seemingly “flood the visa offices,” mentioned Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, a political science professor at Babcock University in Ogun state.
Despite the worldwide backlash over the ban, America nonetheless holds an immense world attraction, particularly to residents of fragile nations. “It’s oof, relief, an optimistic feeling,” mentioned Nizar Asruh, a Libyan in San Diego who mentioned he hoped his mom may now get a visa to return go to.
As properly as expediting excellent purposes, Biden has ordered an instantaneous evaluate of all visas rejected underneath Trump’s measures and an evaluation of contentious “extreme vetting” safety procedures that embody screening an applicant’s social media feeds.
But immigration advocates warn {that a} return to the pre-Trump system is not going to be a panacea.
“Even before, the system was discriminatory and not welcoming to Muslims,” mentioned Gadeir Abbas, a employees legal professional for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It was under the Obama administration that you had the expansion of a terrorism watch list to over a million names that, as far as we can tell, is essentially a list of Muslims.”
Even amongst America’s most ardent admirers, its standing due to the ban has fallen exhausting. In Sudan, Jamal, whose husband received the inexperienced card lottery, mentioned she had dreamed of shifting to America since she was a baby.
“I want my children to have a good life,” she mentioned. “And I want them to be free.” But a sure cynicism had crept into her view of American leaders.
“They are all the same,” she mentioned. “For Trump, we were bad Muslims. For Biden, we are good Muslims. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter; they’ll use us if it’s good for them. We’re just pawns in a chess game.”
As U.S. politics tumbled into violence just lately, others noticed jarring resonances with their very own nations. Diab Serrih, a former political prisoner from Syria, mentioned the mob storming the Capitol reminded him of the thugs who stay loyal in any respect prices to Syria’s dictatorial chief, Bashar Assad.
Having been turned away from America in 2017, Serrih, now residing within the Netherlands, mentioned he wish to strive once more. Still, he was nervous. “The idea of emigrating is scary,” he mentioned. “What if in a few years there’s another Trump?”
Activists are urgent Congress to go the No Ban Act, a proposal supported by Biden to stop future presidents from enacting sweeping journey restrictions.
Still, the injury evaluation from Trump’s ban is more likely to linger on condition that its blunt intent and haphazard utility left a various affect on the affected nations.
In Myanmar, as an illustration, which was added to the checklist simply final 12 months, the Trump ban affected hardly anybody in any respect, rights teams say. Only immigrant visas had been affected, and nearly as quickly because the ban got here into impact, Myanmar shut its borders to stem the pandemic.
“I still haven’t found the answer for why Myanmar was on the list,” mentioned U Ye Myint Win of Fortify Rights, a regional human rights advocacy group.
Iranians, in distinction, suffered enormously.
For a long time they made up the most important pool of visa candidates to the United States, based on visa attorneys and Iranian American advocacy organizations. Before the 1979 revolution, younger Iranians flocked to U.S. universities and returned dwelling with their levels — amongst them Iran’s overseas minister, Javad Zarif, and the top of the Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi.
After 1979 and the next collapse of diplomatic relations with the United States, the development shifted: Iranians who got here to America tended to remain and inspired their kin to comply with. The Trump restrictions, utilized from 2017, brought on these numbers to plummet.
Of 45,000 Iranians who utilized for visa waivers between January 2017 and July 2020, solely 7,000 had been granted visas, based on the State Department. “The impact was across the board — financially, emotionally, educationally, professionally, romantically,” mentioned Reza Mazaheri, a New York-based immigration legal professional who represents many Iranians.
For others, the ban is a closed, tragic chapter.
Mohamed Abdelrahman, a Libyan businessman, thought he hit the jackpot in 2017 when he received a inexperienced card lottery, providing an escape route from a rustic that was plunging deep into chaos, mentioned his nephew, Mohamed Al-Sheikh.
But the Trump ban compelled Abdelrahman to delay, and earlier than he may go away Libya, he suffered a stroke and died.
If there had been no ban, “his life might have been completely different,” mentioned al-Sheikh, 34, talking by telephone from Tripoli. “He just needed a stable place to live for the rest of his life.”