Keeping refugee families apart, reuniting others
new lives in the U.S., the changes are playing out in decidedly unnerving and uneven ways. The restrictions have kept many families apart, while allowing some to reunite, sorting people by country, and effectively by religion.
When Somali refugee Fadumo Hussein and her daughters joined protesters at John Glenn Columbus International Airport last January to protest the administration’s restrictions on arrivals, they did so for very personal reasons. Weeks before the ban was announced, Hussein’s parents, who are 75 and 76, had been approved for entry to the U.S. Their arrival was scheduled for last February. More than a year later, they remain stuck in Uganda, their case on hold.
Watching Bhutanese
Afnan Salem, 19, waits for her class to start at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, in February.
Kamal Sharma, right, of Columbus, embraces his relative Til Gurung, a Bhutanese refugee from Nepal, at the John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, in February. family already here.
Low-rise apartment complexes on Columbus’ north side have become the center of the largest U.S. population of Bhutanese refugees, most who are Buddhist or Hindu and were expelled during a government-led ethnic cleansing campaignagainst ethnic Nepalis in the early 1990s.
More than 20,000 Bhutanese now live alongside the country’s second largest Somali refugee community – overwhelmingly Muslim, and from one of the countries whose arrivals have been most sharply reduced. They’ve been joined by a growing population of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, most of them Christian.