C*I
发帖数: 4736 | 1 About 50 immigrants being detained at Dallas-Fort Worth airport under Trump'
s order
http://slingstone.zenfs.com/offnetwork/87a4335731ed059be64830e126188b4f
By Mark David Smith
[email protected]/* */
Up to 50 people are being detained at DFW Airport under President Donald
Trump’s executive order that bars immigrants from some predominantly Muslim
countries from entering the United States.
Signs saying “Release our Family!” and “Immigrants are welcome here”
were put up along the walkway into the international area of Terminal D at
Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, where family members were confused and frustrated
with the detainment of their loved ones.
Alia Salem with The Council on American-Islamic Relations confirmed that
about 50 people, including green card holders, were being held at DFW.
Among those being detained are the parents of Osama Alolabi, 20, of Syria.
He’s a junior at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and his parents
came here to visit, but were denied entry.
Aloabi said they've been most recently staying in Saudi Arabia but have
Syrian passports.
Trump signed the order — which bans the entry of refugees from Iran, Iraq,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – on Friday, saying it’s designed
to “keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.”
“We don’t want them here,” Trump said. “We want to ensure that we are
not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting
overseas.”
The order covers green card holders, which are legal permanent residents,
and visa-holders from those seven countries who are out of the U.S.,
according to the Department of Homeland Security. The order says they cannot
return to the U.S. for 90 days.
Exemptions exist for immigrants and legal permanent residents whose entry is
in the U.S. national interest, but it’s unclear how that exemption will be
applied.
Trump’s crackdown was reverberating across the world. Airlines were
blocking people from traveling to the U.S. while others were detained upon
arriving at airports, including John F. Kennedy in New York and DFW, both of
which are huge international gateways.
The order drew criticism from U.S. lawmakers and officials around the globe.
In Iran, the foreign ministry suggested the country would limit issuing
visas to American tourists in retaliation.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent a message on Twitter Saturday,
saying refugees were welcome in his country, “regardless of your faith.”
Two of the first people blocked from entering the United States were Iraqis
with links to the U.S. military, according to The Associated Press.
Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi were detained
by immigration officials after landing at New York’s JFK Airport Friday
night. Darweesh had worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army when it
invaded Iraq in 2003. Later he worked as a contract engineer. He was allowed
into the U.S. Saturday afternoon, hours after his attorney petitioned a
federal court to let the two men go, according to AP.
In their court filing, his lawyers said Alshawai’s wife had worked for a U.
S. security contractor in Iraq. Members of her family had been killed by
insurgents because of their association with the U.S. military.
CAIR officials said they would challenge the constitutionality of Trump’s
order.
“There is no evidence that refugees — the most thoroughly vetted of all
people entering our nation — are a threat to national security,” said Lena
F. Masri, the group’s national litigation director. “This is an order
that is based on bigotry, not reality.”
It is unclear how many people would be immediately impacted by the non-
refugee travel ban. According to the statistics maintained by the Homeland
Security Department, about 17,000 students from the seven designated
countries were allowed into the U.S. for the 2015-2016 school year. In 2015
more than 86,000 people from those countries arrived in the U.S. on other,
non-immigrant visas and more than 52,000 others became legal permanent
residents.
Last year the U.S. resettled 85,000 people displaced by war, political
oppression, hunger and religious prejudice, including more than 12,000
Syrians. Before leaving office President Barack Obama announced that the U.S
. would accept 110,000 refugees in the coming year, but Trump’s order cut
that by more than half to 50,000.
No refugees were in the air when the travel ban was signed Friday, but about
350 people were in transit in Nairobi, Kenya, and were now stuck there,
said Melanie Nezer, vice president of policy and advocacy for HIAS, a
refugee resettlement aid agency. She said several hundred more people who
were booked on U.S.-bound flights in the next week were now stranded around
the globe.
“This in effect could be a permanent ban,” she said. “Many of these
people may never be able to come.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article129384464.html |
