The Washington Post’s Steve Friess and William Wan don’t seem to have had much trouble finding people in Michigan (let’s go out on a limb and guess we’re talking about white people) willing to say things like “I had my daughter’s birthday party yesterday, and that’s just much more important to me than whether potential terrorists have had their feelings hurt.” Here’s hoping those people read the story they’re quoted in, and take even a split second to think about these “potential terrorists” and their “hurt feelings.”
It took half an hour to get through to Ankara, Turkey, where they had left their pregnant daughter, Enas, and her husband three months ago. Back then, it seemed only a matter of time before the young couple would join the Badats and their three younger children in Bloomfield Township in the Detroit suburbs, where they had gained entry as Syrian refugees. Then President Trump issued his visa ban. Overnight, their world shifted.
By the time they reached Enas over a shaky WhatsApp connection Sunday morning, everyone on both sides of the line was crying.
“It took so long to be pregnant; I wanted you to be able to help me,” said Enas, 25 and due in March. She appeared on the phone’s tiny screen in a black hijab, sitting before a tattered gray curtain. Money had grown so tight in recent days she told them, that she was eating little more than small bits of bread and cheese.
“I can’t believe I will now be on my own,” she said.
Gosh, that sounds trivial next to a kid’s birthday party, doesn’t it?
The Post, among others, is doing a great job covering the stories of people and families affected by Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.
Like Khaldoon Alaswad, an American citizen who can’t visit his elderly mother in Syria because, as an outspoken critic of the Assad regime, it would be too dangerous for him. He’d convinced her to visit him and her grandchildren in the U.S., but now, thanks to Trump’s Muslim ban, Alaswad may not have another chance to see his mother before she dies.
Or Vahideh Rasekhi, a graduate student at Stony Brook University, trying to come back to school after visiting her family in Iran and having her student visa renewed. She was put on a plane back to Iran after a federal judge blocked Trump’s Muslim ban. When she called a friend to say she’d been detained:
“She was a little rattled, her voice was a little shaky,” said Smyth, who tried to calm her by telling her about the federal judge’s stay on Trump’s order. “She said, ‘No one here seems to know that — they’re planning on putting me on a plane.’”
The plane made it to the runway before it turned around to let Rasekhi off.
Or Hamid Kargaran, waiting to see if his wife—a green card holder—would be allowed to return from visiting her parents in Iran.
For two sleepless days, Kargaran said, he has desperately tried to get information from airlines, government officials, friends and family. At one point, he staked out a part of San Francisco International Airport where Customs and Border Protection officers take their break. Three of them gave him different answers to the same questions; one of them told him: “Iranians are not our friends.”
It’s been a shock to a man who joined pro-American demonstrations in Tehran after terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. What he was hearing now, as friends advised him to scrub from his phone any social media posts that suggested he disagreed with Trump, reminded him of the Iranian repression that drove him from the country.
Then there’s the 5-year-old who was detained for hours at the airport before being released to his terrified mother.
But, you know, these potential terrorists and their hurt feelings just don’t stack up to a child’s birthday party.