Ban crushes hopes of Iraqi refugees
Lawyers of migrants held at airport start a class action for unlawful detention
NEW YORK // President Donald Trump’s executive order closing US borders to refugees was only a few hours old when the legal challenges began.
Lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees who were held at New York’s Kennedy airport filed a writ seeking their release and made the first move to start a class action for all refugees and immigrants detained unlawfully at US ports of entry, The New York Times reported. They fear for their lives if forced to return to Iraq.
The president’s order blocking all refugees from entering the country for 120 days – or indefinitely for those from Syria – left people already travelling to the US in legal limbo. Hameed Darweesh worked for the US government for 10 years in his native Iraq. He was detained when he arrived at Kennedy airport on Friday night.
Fellow Iraqi Haider Alshawi was hoping to join his wife – who had worked for a US contractor – and his son in the US. He was also stopped at Kennedy airport on Friday.
Their lawyers said they were not allowed to meet their clients. When one of them, Mark Doss, the supervising lawyer at the International Refugee Assistance Project, asked with whom he needed to talk to resolve the impasse, a customs and border protection agent replied: “Mr President. Call Mr Trump.”
“These are people with valid visas and legitimate refugee claims who have already been determined by the state department and the department of homeland security to be admissible and to be allowed to enter the US,” Mr Doss said. “They are being unlawfully detained.”
After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, legislators created two refugee programmes to protect the thousands of Iraqis who risked their lives helping Americans in Iraq. The special immigrant visa programme stopped accepting applications in 2014, but the direct access programme for US-Affiliated Iraqis was continuing – until Friday.
Mr Darweesh was an interpreter for the US army and worked as an engineer and contractor, and says he was twice directly targeted for working with the American military. He was granted a special immigrant visa on January 20, the day of Mr Trump’s inauguration, and arrived in New York with his wife and three children on Friday evening. They were allowed in. He was not. Mr Alshawi was already on the plane to New York when Mr Trump signed the document that now prevents him from joining his wife and son in Houston.
In a brief phone call to his wife, he said he had tried to apply for asylum but was told he would have to go back to Iraq.
In Baghdad, an Iraqi who applied for refugee status under the direct access programme said:
‘ These are people with valid visas who have already been allowed to enter the US Mark Doss Lawyer
“Mr Trump killed our dreams. I don’t have any hope to go to the United States.”
He had received abusive texts on his mobile phone because his wife was a bookkeeper for the US Agency for International Development. He applied to emigrate in 2013.
The same year, he was shot in the head while driving to work. He survived but is now deaf in one ear and lives in fear of retribution by militants in Iraq.
More than 7,000 Iraqis, many of them interpreters for the US military, have resettled in the US under the special immigrant visa programme since 2008, while another 500 or so are still being processed, according to state department figures. Another 58,000 Iraqis were awaiting interviews under the direct access programme, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project.
“A lot of translators were trying to get out of there because they had a mark on their head for working with US forces,” said Allen Vaught, a former US army captain who served in Fallujah in 2003.
“They are viewed as collaborators.”