How I Felt When the 'Muslim Ban' Was Enacted... And When It Was Repealed

January 20, 2021

I've told this story more than once before. At least once in full detail on the Facebook account I had at the time, and almost every year when it came up as a memory, prompting me to share it again. That Facebook post begins with, "I tried writing this post about an hour ago, but I feel so passionately about it that it began turning into a novel. Let me try again and keep it to a length people might actually read."

But it was hard keeping it short. I was so angry, so sad. It's been four years now, and I'm still angry and sad -- although today I am happy, as well. Now that I have this blog as an outlet, I'm going to tell the story again, and it might not be kept to as short a length as it was on Facebook, but that's fine. That's why this blog exists to begin with.

What happened on January 27, 2017 changed a lot of lives, destroyed a lot of people's hopes and dreams. I'm not one of the ones most affected, but I'm not unaffected -- because I've seen the most-affected people, and because I care about them.

I began volunteering with a refugee resettlement agency in August of 2016, so at this time, I'd been doing it for about five months. Once a week I would work with refugees who had just arrived in the United States as recently as a few days earlier. I loved it and I loved the clients. Only five months in, I'd already had so many wonderful experiences with these refugees.

But among the few I'll never forget was the one I worked with on that day.

His name was Ali. He was from Iraq. He had a wife and children who had come to the U.S. with him, but because his wife wasn't feeling well that day, they had opted to stay at home.

With us was Qasim, an Arabic interpreter who was also from Iraq and still had family there, though he had lived in the U.S. for years.

I taught the refugee clients how to take public transportation in their new city, so they could get to classes, grocery stores, eventually find work, etc. I worked with them face-to-face, traveling on the bus with them to get them acclimated to it. Usually there would be an interpreter with us, as most of the clients didn't speak English yet. Sometimes they would speak English and no interpreter would join us. Sometimes there'd be multiple families and the number of clients would be in double digits. Other times, like this day, I would have only one client.

The three of us embarked on our journey, and unfortunately we narrowly missed our second bus, leaving us at a bus stop for about half an hour waiting for the next one to come along. There was a gas station on the corner, and it was January, so Qasim, the interpreter, suggested we go inside and get some hot coffee; or in my case, hot chocolate since I don't like coffee.

After the bus came, we made it to our destination and concluded our training. We went over most of the important stuff at the office, in addition to what we'd already gone over on the bus. Ali had already been taught pretty much everything he needed to know, and seemed pretty confident about what he'd learned, when Qasim unfortunately had to leave. He hadn't realized that his wife had booked him another appointment and he didn't have time to complete this one as he suddenly found out. So his wife came and picked him up from the office, leaving Ali and myself to get back home on our own.

That wasn't a problem for either of us, although we knew the language barrier could make it awkward.

I always see the clients back to their homes to make sure they don't get lost. Once they are safely in their own apartments, I head back to mine. So Ali and I had a long bus ride together for two people who didn't speak the same language. My Arabic is basically limited to "Peace be with you" and phrases about God. He spoke a few words of English, but not enough to be conversational. We mostly communicated with very simple words and hand gestures.

We wound up back at the same bus stop near the gas station on the corner, and another fairly lengthy wait for a bus to arrive; only about fifteen minutes this time, but certainly long enough to be out in the cold. It was particularly windy that day, in addition to the normal January cold. So Ali motioned toward the gas station and said, "Coffee?"

We went in and he got a coffee. I got another small hot chocolate and got in line behind him at the register. I hadn't been paying any attention to the prices, so when the cashier told him his total, I showed him how many American dollars it would take to pay for what I thought was just his drink. And then I stepped up to the register, prepared to pay for my own. That was when the cashier told me that he had paid for mine too.

I will never, ever forget this gesture. It was so small, but so sweet. This man was a refugee who'd only been in this country a few days, who had come here fleeing war, violence and poverty, who had probably arrived here with very little money to his name. And he paid for my drink.

This isn't the only time I experienced such a thing from my refugee clients. I can't even count the number of times, in the few years I was doing transit training, I would walk a client or family back to their apartment and be invited in for coffee, juice, fruit, cookies, or even a full meal. Whether from Iraq, the Congo, or Burma -- those Burmese families, especially -- they were always so hospitable. And while they knew that I was volunteering to help them, they wanted to help me as well. They are such kind, loving people. They've known some of the worst scenarios we can imagine -- war, hate crimes, destitution -- and they are still so good to other people.

I miss them. Typing this up has made me realize how much I miss them. I rarely saw them a second time in the position I had, so there wasn't a lot of time for relationship building. I still built relationships with some of them anyway. There was a young woman named Libin I got really close to because she spoke English, allowing us to communicate better without the barrier of an interpreter. She was so intelligent, loved books and was fascinated by the Irish culture. She was from Somalia. Another young woman, a Kurdish girl who went by Nikki even though it wasn't her given name, showed me pictures of her new husband on her phone, proudly showed off her simple wedding band, and even laid her head on my shoulder as we sat next to each other on the bus. It was like instantly having a sister. She taught me a couple of words of her language, and I even introduced her to some German darkwave music because... why not. There are some clients I've only met one time in my life, and will probably never see again, but I'll never forget. I feel so blessed to have had these experiences with them, shared cultures and learned about each other. After the pandemic is under control, I'll be thrilled to get back to meeting them.

Anyway, back to my original point.

Ali and I made it back to his apartment, and with huge smiles and warm handshakes, we both thanked each other very sincerely and said goodbye. Then I got back on another bus and began the long journey back to Tempe, where I lived at the time, from Glendale, where Ali's apartment was. It was about a 2-to-3-hour trip.

It had been a very long night and a very long day for me. I passed out as soon as I got home. And a few hours later, I woke up to bad news: the refugee ban, also called the travel ban or "Muslim ban," an executive order stopping refugees from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.

I immediately thought of Ali, that sweet man who had bought me hot chocolate, as well as all the others who have been so kind and hospitable to me, all the interpreters I'd worked with who still had family in their native countries, all the clients I'd made personal connections with. And all the ones I would never be able to meet because of this.

I got sick to the stomach. I was so filled with anxiety over it that I couldn't sleep for a couple of days. I just kept reading the news and looking up more information, trying to find protests to join and ways to make my voice heard. To make things even worse, I then began reading about refugees who'd already been cleared to arrive here, and were already in the air when the ban was enacted, who were then stranded and detained at airports when they arrived, most of them probably not knowing English, being so confused and scared.

Refugees have been my most passionate cause since 2015, and at that time I'd been working one-on-one with them for about five months as mentioned earlier. The travel ban broke my heart that day.

Two days later, I went to the first protest I'd ever attended, but it would be far from the last. The protests were happening all across the country at all the major airports. I happily, yet with anger in my heart, arrived at Sky Harbor to show my support for the refugees I'd come to love so dearly.

The official position was that it was a "temporary" ban lasting 90-120 days, while the administration "figured things out" and reevaluated the vetting process to make things "safer," but we knew that was a lie. We knew the vetting process was already extreme, with some refugees waiting 15-20 years in camps before getting resettled here. We knew things were already safe, and that no person had ever committed a terrorist act after coming here as a refugee. We knew they wouldn't actually do anything during this time, like investigating or evaluating the actual vetting process or making any attempt to lift the ban as soon as things were "figured out." And we knew that the ban would not last only 90-120 days.

We knew that this fear of refugees was not grounded in reality, but in xenophobia, and because it was Muslim-majority countries that were mostly affected, in Islamophobia as well.

It's four years later now, minus exactly one week. Four years of barely any refugees being admitted to the United States. I continued to volunteer, but there weren't as many clients anymore, and almost all of them were from the same country, since most other countries experiencing a refugee crisis were now on the ban list. Of course, I still loved and cared for those refugees from the Congo (the only place most of my clients were coming from now) but the lack of people from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim-majority countries was so obvious.

But today, after four years, that ban was finally lifted.

You all know I wasn't the most excited about getting Joe Biden as Trump's Democratic opponent. There are plenty of other people I would rather have instead of him. I don't think he's the best person we could have as president. If he does things I don't approve of, I will speak out. But to say Biden is "just as bad" or "nothing will change..." that's just crazy. Things are already changing. On his very first day, within hours of taking office, he repealed the Muslim ban, as well as several other executive orders of Trump's, including those regarding DACA and detained children at the border. Is Joe Biden perfect? No. Is he a million times better than Trump? Absolutely. This one little action proves that. There are people who will say that Biden being inaugurated isn't something to celebrate, and I understand where they're coming from. But the president's actions today are worth celebrating. So let's celebrate them, and let's continue putting pressure on him to continue doing good things.

I had heard he was planning to sign an executive order putting an end to the ban and other things, but I was still approaching it with caution. When I heard the news that it was officially lifted, I cried for a good five or ten minutes. I don't think I have cried like that, where the tears were not ones of sadness, for years. Tears of relief, joy, whatever you want to call them, I was overcome with emotion thinking of all the lives we could save, all the people we could help simply by welcoming them.

Unfortunately, we're now welcoming them into a country with a raging pandemic, but maybe that can be the next thing we work on. If we put the work in, then step by step, maybe we can get to a place where the U.S. is actually the beacon of hope it has always claimed to be.

tags: refugees