“Cruel.”
“Very confused.”
“Scary times.”
These are just some of the reactions of members of New York immigrant communities following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s new travel ban.
THE restrictionsAnnounced Wednesday, should take effect on Monday and will most directly affect citizens traveling from 12 countries: Haiti, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Chad, Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Libya, according to the white house list.
Citizens of these countries will be largely prohibited from entering the United States, with a few exceptions. In addition, citizens of seven other countries, including Venezuela and Cuba, will be refused by student or tourist visas and prohibited from obtaining a permanent American residence.
Trump said the ban was necessary for national security reasons, declaring in a video That “nothing will prevent us from keeping America safe”.
The Haitian community of the city, which has nearly 117,000 people according to 2020 Census estimatesis by far the largest immigration population to be affected by the prohibition of travel, followed by the Yemeni, Iranian and Afghan communities, each of which is less than 20,000.
Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive officer of New York Immigration Coalition, said that the last measure was equivalent to “the racist exclusion of certain people”.
“It is not only cruel, it is an attack calculated against immigrants and our communities which continue to be scapegoat by this administration,” said Awawdeh. “This ban is designed to spread fear and division in our communities.”
Immigrant rights have said that the measure spoke about the battle was fighting on a similar travel ban, said Trump took office in 2017.
However, the Supreme Court in 2018 governed 5-4 that the restrictions were constitutional. Legal experts said they expected the last measure also maintained, citing the broad latitude granted to the executive power to determine the immigration policy.
Awawdeh said that his organization was ready to fight travel ban, as at the start of the first Trump administration. At the time, thousands of New Yorkers streets from Lower Manhattan to protest and present at JFK airport.
Rana Abdelhamid, the executive director of Malikah, an antiviolence group based on the Queens who serves New Yorkers in the North, said that many members of the community compete for a travel ban and had canceled trips abroad for fear that they are not allowed to come back.
“It was therefore confronted with the separation of extended families and not being able to like to connect with their loved ones,” said Abdelhamid, adding that she was working with asylum seekers from two of the countries on the list, Sudan and Chad, who had applied for asylum and are now “very confused” what is their status, in the wake of the prohibition.
Debbie Almontaser, the co-founder of the Yemeni American Merchants Association, said that the travel ban was “clearly rooted in the desire to exclude Muslims and countless other black and brown communities”.
In the immediate wake of the announcement, Almontaser said that many members of the community asked him what the implications of the ban for their loved ones were living abroad were.
“” Does that mean that their visa is canceled? Does that mean that they can’t come? “” The questions she described hearing.
“I had to tell them that this ban will take effect on Monday at 12:01,” she said. “They must bring their family into an plane as soon as possible and pray so that they are allowed to enter JFK. But if they fly after Monday 12:01, they will not be allowed.”
“We live in scary moments,” she said.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of retirement from the practice of immigration law at Cornell Law School, said that the travel ban had many “sculptures”. He said international athletes would be authorized to enter the country, and permanent residents and foreign citizens who are already in the country “do not have to worry about it”.
“For other people from these countries, they will probably not be able to enter the United States,” he said.
Yale-Loehr said that although judicial disputes are expected, the ban on travel should be confirmed by the courts.
“The Supreme Court has judged that all presidents have a broad discretion with immigration because it deals with foreign affairs, in particular when this immigration effort deals with national security,” said Yale-Loehr, adding that “you use a hammer hammer rather than a scalpel to say that each person in a particular country is a risk of national security”.
Muzaffar Chishti, a principal researcher at the Migration Policy Institute, said that he expected that the travel ban “adopts in part”, in part because it involved multiple factors to determine if a country should appear on the list.
Chishti said it probably allowed her to overcome the charges that she was justly motivated by “the religious animus”, as was the case in the previous iterations of the travel ban during the first Trump administration.
“” They clearly learned the dispute the last time, “said Chishti.
The ban was announced with a executive decreeWho said that “these protocols improve our ability to detect foreign nationals who can commit, help or support acts of terrorism, or otherwise constitute a security threat, and they help our efforts to prevent these people from entering the United States.”
The order argued that the countries on the list were chosen for various reasons, including their “screening and verification capacities”, information sharing policies, “if each country has a significant terrorist presence on its territory” and Visa coating rates.
In a video ad From the ban on travel, Trump quoted people who had exceeded their visas, saying: “We do not want” them “.
Elsie Saint Louis, executive director of the Haitian Americans united for progress, rejected language in the executive decree which claimed “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian foreigners flooded in the United States during the Biden administration”.
“They were invited. There was a parole program. This parole program was legal. These people were legally admitted,” she said. “So, all of a sudden, labeling in this way is unfair and inhuman.”
She said that the ban would lead to the separation of the Haitian New Yorkers from their loved ones in Haiti and put themselves in the heels of racialized fear, including a lie Proposed by Trump before the 2024 elections that Haitian immigrants in Ohio ate dogs.
“This travel ban is just a blow for our community,” said Saint Louis.
