Activists take on travel ban’s impact
OAKLAND » In an underground auditorium at the Oakland Main Library, more than 50 attendees gathered on Saturday morning to hear what immigration attorneys, activists and Muslim community organizers had to say about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the travel ban of seven Muslim-majority countries, its impact on Muslim communities and how Bay Area residents can fight back.
The travel ban was introduced in January 2017 as an executive order by President Donald Trump, barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entry to the United States. The first iteration of the travel ban was blocked in federal courts after mass demonstrations occurred in airports across the country, including San Francisco International Airport, demanding the release of detained refugees.
The ban, upheld by the Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision, was not an executive order but a presidential proclamation of which citizens from five Muslimmajority countries — plus North Korea and Venezuela — were restricted entry into the United States.
The proclamation allows citizens of the impacted countries to apply for a waiver, but it remains unclear how the waiver process works and how many people can come to the United States through it, according to Brittney Rezaei, an immigrant rights attorney at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Bay Area office, and one of the panelists at the Oakland forum.
“There’s no formal process in how they apply for it and how they get one,” Rezaei said. “The waiver process is, as some courts called it, window dressing.”
Mohamed Taleb, a community advocate for the Asian Law Caucus who participated in the forum, called the waiver process “a sham.”
“People’s cases have been either denied or on hold indefinitely,” said Taleb, a Yemeni immigrant who grew up in Oakland. “It’s left a lot of families feeling ex-
hausted and broke.”
Taleb recounted his last visit to Yemen before his homeland was ravaged by war and his father was shot in the leg by a sniper. Yemenis, like Taleb’s sister and brother-in-law, fled to nearby Djibouti to seek refuge into the United States through the consulate there, but they face months, even years, to get a visa, he said.
The Supreme Court decision has been disastrous for some residents in the Bay Area, according to Payman Amiri, a co-founder Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland and one of the panelists. He shared stories of immigrants and regulars at the center who are separately indefinitely from their wives, husbands, fiancees and children.
Amiri also said the travel ban instilled fear in many immigrants who have permanent residency and even U.S. citizenship from traveling back to their home country or anywhere outside the United States.
“These are real people who get impacted,” Amiri said. “Some of them are directly affected by the Muslim ban and some of them are affected by effective fear.”
Sabiha Basrai, co-coordinator of Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, said that fighting against the Muslim ban is interlocked with fighting to stop separation of families of undocumented immigrants at the border and both should equally be demanded by Bay Area residents. Basrai said she participated in the blockade protest of the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco earlier this week and encouraged attendees to take action.
“For Muslim-Americans, we wanted them to see their struggles were connected to undocumented immigrants and that our struggles are linked together,” Basrai said. “These targets are not isolated. These acts enable them to target more communities.”
Oakland City Councilmember Abel Guillen kicked off the event by announcing that the city will soon launch a hate crimes hotline to combat rising number of such crimes in the city.