NOTHING WE CAN WAIT
FOR FROM THE TRUMP TEAM
The survival of the
refugees, who are in the country that is provisionally, is a survival of complicated survival, they have only
the hope of putting them in countries available to accept them and that they
are of their preference (if possible).
It
was from this perspective that Syrian refugees provisionally in Turkey survived
all these years. Some waiting to travel to the US and settle there. It was even
promised and confirmed by the United Nations, and everything was evolving in
the near-final process. It came the laws of Trump and what was to become
reality after some more formalities ceased to be. The reality is that Trump
turned America into a nation without honesty, without honest word. No longer
can Syrian refugee travel and settle in the United States.
The
following publication tells just that. The team of monsters set up at the White
House had blurred all the dreams of refugees who were simply waiting for plane
tickets to embark on a new life opportunity. Trump, the monster without a word,
dishonestly nullified the commitments of the American state, and despotiously
destined many refugees to more uncertainty, to subduing.
That
is what the following article deals with. The pangs of Trump and his team show
their inhumanity unscrupulously. From this Trump team nothing good can be
expected.
Mark Lane, in Washington DC for TA
THE
U.S. BREAKS ITS PROMISE TO SYRIAN REFUGEES IN TURKEY
By Emily
Feldman*
Hours
before Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all refugees’ admission
to the United States, and banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority
nations, including Syria, Sohir, a forty-four-year-old woman living in
Istanbul, was imagining a reunion in America with her son. (Sohir, like other
refugees interviewed for this article, requested that her full name not be
used, out of fear of jeopardizing her resettlement case.) “I think I’m going to
Los Angeles, because my sponsor is there. But I can then go to him in
Philadelphia,” she said on Friday. “I won’t bother him in his daily life, but
I’ll be close to him if he needs me or if I miss him.”
Sohir
had been apart from seventeen-year-old Mohamed, her only child, since
September, when he left Istanbul to finish high school in the United States. In
2013, Sohir and Mohamed fled the war-torn city of Homs. They slept on friends’
couches in Istanbul for months, finally saving enough money to rent a
closet-sized apartment, where Sohir now lives by herself. “I really feel so
lonely without him,” she said.
Mother
and son registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, in
January, 2014—the first step in the long and complicated process of
resettlement. To their relief, their case was referred to the U.S. Both fluent
in English, they had hoped to be placed in an English-speaking country, which
would allow them to more easily integrate. They then began the intensive
vetting process, which culminated in January, 2015, with a three-day course on
American culture. “I thought it’s very soon I’m leaving Turkey,” Sohir
recalled. “My family travelled to Istanbul to say goodbye.”
The
local agency managing their case said to expect information about flights in a
matter of weeks, but it never came. Cases can be delayed for a number of
reasons. Agencies might decide to run subsequent security checks, and are
sometimes simply understaffed. In addition, the Turkish government has
intentionally delayed the
exit of more than a thousand of the most educated refugees,
the Guardian reported last fall, claiming that “the most vulnerable”
need to be helped first.
Sohir,
who studied journalism at Damascus University, became worried enough to look
for alternatives. She encouraged Mohamed to apply for a scholarship that
enabled him to file for a student visa to the U.S. He received the visa in
August, in the final weeks of the Presidential campaign.
When
we spoke on Friday, at a Syrian community center in central Istanbul, where she
works, Sohir told me she had heard the rumors about Trump’s immigration orders.
But she was trying to stay positive. Even if she were barred from the U.S., she
wanted Mohamed to stay there as long as he legally could. “The important thing
is for him to make a life,” she said. “He has good grades, and I think his life
there will be better than any other place. I hope he can finish high school and
college there.”
Sohir
admits that the prospect of staying alone in Turkey unnerves her. “At my age,
after this war destroyed our lives and took everything away from us, I’m so
tired to learn the Turkish language and start again,” she said. “I know I’d
have to start again in the United States, but even though my English isn’t very
good, I know the basics. If people talk to me, I understand.”
Across
the city, just beyond the waters of Istanbul’s iconic Golden Horn, two Syrian
sisters living in the conservative neighborhood of Fatih had just learned that
their plans to resettle in the U.S. would be halted by Trump’s order. “Isn’t
Donald Trump’s wife an immigrant? How can he do what he’s doing?” Rana (a
pseudonym), who is twenty-five, asked. She had been a year away from an
engineering degree when she and her family fled the war, in 2014. “There was no
water, no electricity, no life,” she said, describing the situation in
Damascus. “We couldn’t stay.”
Rana
sat at a crowded hookah bar with her eighteen-year-old sister, Leen. “We are
all so depressed,” Rana said. “My parents worked their whole lives to teach us
and give us a good future. And now they’re seeing us sitting around doing
nothing.”
Rana
and her family completed their cultural-orientation course last March, and,
like Sohir and Mohamed, they spent the months that followed waiting for news
about their flights. When Rana still hadn’t heard anything by May, she called
the refugee agency managing her family’s case, and was reassured that her
family would eventually be issued plane tickets to Chicago.
Rana
programmed Chicago’s weather on her phone (thirty-one degrees and overcast on
Friday). Leen doubled down on her refusal to learn Turkish or pursue
friendships in Istanbul. She prefers to chat with Facebook friends in Brooklyn,
whom she gets along with better than her conservative neighbors. “I don’t feel
like I belong here. I skateboard, I play electric guitar,” she said, with a
flawless American accent. “Everyone stares at me, like, ‘What are you doing?’ I
can’t wait to go to America.”
Rana is more sober about the possibility
that they’ll never get to the United States. Alarmed by the reports last summer
that Turkey was withholding exit permits from some more educated Syrians, she
began frantically making phone calls to try to expedite her family’s departure.
She called refugee-support organizations and pleaded with operators at the
U.N.’s call centers. She even searched for Angelina Jolie’s contact
information. (“Maybe she can help us—she’s a great humanitarian,” Rana
explained.) She protested at the U.N. office in Ankara, and sent e-mails to the
office of Senator Dick Durban, of Illinois, along with the refugee-resettlement
agency expecting her family in Chicago. No one was able to help her, and that
was before Trump signed his order.
On
Friday, Chris Boian, a spokesman for the U.N.H.C.R., said that, after Trump’s
order, his organization was looking at alternative resettlement options—“of
which there are not a lot.”
“Every
resettlement place is a very precious opportunity for people, and there are
just simply not a lot of them,” he said, pointing out that less than one per
cent of the world’s refugees are resettled at all. In a statement released on
Monday, the U.N.H.C.R. said that some eight hundred refugees had been immediately
affected by Trump’s order—people who, like Rana and her family, were approved
to resettle in the U.S. but hadn’t yet made the trip.
Having
believed for months that his family would be among the lucky ones, Mohammed
Abdul Kader was full of anxiety on Friday.
The
fifty-three-year-old father of ten had fled Aleppo with his wife and four
youngest children. They were living in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep,
and they were running out of money. “I’m living in bad conditions. I can’t
afford the rent, and there is a hole in my roof. It’s been raining a lot, and a
lot of water is coming inside,” he said, speaking by phone.
Kader’s
mother, his brother, and his brother’s family had all made it to Michigan. His
family was notified, in May, that they would be admitted to the United States,
and he was eager to get the four children living with him, aged thirteen to
seventeen, back in school. They haven’t attended in six years. “Our last year
in Syria, we were moving a lot because of the war, and then in Turkey there
were problems enrolling them,” he said. “They want to continue their
education.”
Faten
Diab, a thirty-four-year-old Syrian living in Kayseri, in central Turkey, who
had been awaiting resettlement in Chicago, said she refused to give up hope in
the American ideals that had drawn her to the country. “America is the country
of freedom,” she said. Her husband, though, said he was “terrified.” With Sohir
, who knows him through a social-media group of Syrian refugees, translating
his Arabic to English, he explained, over the phone, that he works at least
seventy-two hours a week at a steel factory, where he earns less than three
hundred dollars a month.
“Here
in Turkey, everyone treats me poorly. If I finish my work, no one gives me
rest. They tell me to clean the toilets. They are rude to me,” he said. “And
I’ve just been trying to be patient until I leave for the United States.”
Speaking of the U.S. and U.N.’s refugee-vetting process, he said, “I’ve done
what they asked me to do. We’ve been waiting a long, long time to continue our
lives.”
When
the call was finished, Sohir’s eyes filled with tears. “We are still humans,”
she said.
*The New Yorker - Emily Feldman is a journalist based in Istanbul.
Photo:
In a photograph from November, 2015, a Syrian family arrives in Detroit. Donald
Trump’s recent executive order has stymied refugees who have already completed
most of the resettlement process. PHOTOGRAPH BY SALWAN GEORGES / THE NEW YORK
TIMES / REDUX
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