Families hit by US travel ban speak out
WASHINGTON: Pamela and Afshin Raghebi will celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary this December - but whether it’s a joyful occasion or one marred by the pain of their ongoing forced separation depends on the outcome of the Nov 3 election. “I need him home,” Pamela tearfully told AFP,
two years after her husband left the US to complete a routine legal process to finalize his permanent residency, but was prevented from returning because of the “Muslim ban”.
In June 2018, the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump’s third travel ban, which focuses its most restrictive measures on citizens of five Muslimmajority countries - Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen - as well as North Korea and Venezuela. An analyst at the Cato Institute estimated that as of Oct 2019, more than 15,000 spouses and adopted minor children
of US citizens were impacted, a figure that could be far higher now.
But the numbers don’t tell the story of the families torn apart and lives uprooted because of a president who once declared “Islam hates us”. The Raghebis met in the summer of 2010, when Pamela was working as a receptionist at a Seattle retirement home and Afshin, a glazier, was assigned there on a project. “Right away, I was impressed with how gentle he was with our residents,” said Pamela.
One day she approached him for a chat, they went on their first date, and were married by the end of that year. The couple started their own window and glass business, building together a happy life. Afshin, 51, was born in Iran and had been forced to become a child soldier in the war against Iraq. He later took up a job as a chauffeur, and was assaulted by secret police for refusing to spy on his boss.
He fled to Sweden in his twenties to stay with his sister, and, like her, became a Christian. But with little by the way of formal training, he couldn’t remain there and eventually came to the US in 2006. Afshin intended to apply for asylum based on his fear of religious persecution if he went back to Iran, but worried about being deported and didn’t follow up.
The couple applied for Afshin to become a permanent resident in 2016 after immigration services were satisfied they had a bona fide relationship. But because of Afshin’s undocumented entry, they had to procure an additional waiver, another arduous process which they nevertheless achieved. To complete the process, Afshin had to exit and re-enter the US, but has been stranded in Turkey since 2018 because of the travel ban. “I felt like my country had divorced me from my husband,” said Pamela - and the trauma has been compounded by mounting financial hardship.
Some stories have had a happier ending following years of struggle, like that of Ramez Alghazzouli, 31, and his wife, 28-year-old Asmaa Khadem Al-Arbaiin. They were acquaintances at college in Damascus but the Syrian war scattered their families to different parts of the world. Ramez settled in Arizona where he became a business analyst for the government. He reconnected with Asmaa, whose family moved to Turkey in 2014, and they developed a romantic relationship before getting married by proxy in 2015.