While you may be able to simply get in your car or get on a plane and see your family and friends, there are people who just recently had their hopes dashed of ever seeing their families again. They are being sent back to where they fought so hard to escape.
People are terrified they will be snatched from their homes in America and sent away. They are terrified of what tomorrow holds. They are terrified of the unknown future handed to them. Families here and in foreign countries are having their lives forever changed in the worst way possible.
President Trump’s executive order was officially implemented January 27. The order states seven predominantly Muslim countries are banned from entering the United States. The countries impacted are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The ban also indefinitely stops our Syrian Refugee program and impacts Visa and Green Card holders outside of the United States.
Refugees trying to give their kids a better life won’t be let in. Refugees trying to leave a country destroyed by war will be forced to stay there. They will have to continue to live in fear of not waking up healthy and alive tomorrow. Worried their kids will be caught in the crossfire of gunshots.
“I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry,” Trump says in his orders.
During his campaign, he mentioned keeping Syrians out of America multiple times. He also mentioned creating safe zones where the refugees could escape the dangers of their country and live peacefully but, as of right now, he has made no such claim as to creating these zones.
“I wasn’t surprised [the ban] happened. It was something I saw coming,” president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of South Florida and biomedical science major, Munazzah Bagdadi said. “It is a horrible thing and isn’t something that should have happened. It shocked me it happened so soon.”
While the ban has not affected her personally, she says some of her family was planning on visiting her but now they cannot. She has friends and members in the MSA that have been affected personally. “It is the beginning of a downward spiral,” she said.
“If the media showed us in a positive light, people would see we aren’t different than everyone else. We just pray a little different or wear a piece of cloth on our head. When you don’t know, you fear. We can educate people. We have to show ourselves and show others there is nothing to be afraid of,” she said.
She goes on, “If there is a terrorist and their desire is to do damage, nothing is going to stop them. It is not that hard to fake documentation in this day in age with things like Photoshop. Creating a ban gives people a reason to create hate in their heart even though hate should not exist. We should never create reasons to create hate between people.”
Former president of Students Organize for Syria on USF and political science major, Hala Alkattan is terrified of what the future holds for these Muslim countries — especially Syria, where her family lives.
“My family is from Syria so it scares me. I had hope of them coming here to be safe but that hope has been shattered. I’ve heard they only want to let in Christian Syrians. What has America come to? This is a land of immigrants and this is what makes the country better. [The ban] won’t make anything better in Syria. I have no idea what to expect with Trump at all for the future,” Alkattan said.
The refugees do go through an extreme vetting process to be allowed in America already. “Of all the categories of persons entering the U.S., these refugees are the single most heavily screened and vetted,” Jana Mason, a senior adviser to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, explained to Time Magazine. They are interviewed and background checked; their lives turned into an open book for entry into our country.
Even though many feel what Trump is doing is immoral and wrong, he is not acting illegally. According to attorney Jessica S., everything Trump is doing is his Constitutional right.
“I think that the President is acting within the confines of the Constitution. That does NOT make it right — but he is doing what the Constitution says he should do,” she says. “President Obama did something similar in 2011 when he put a hold on all Iraqi refugees coming into America. It wasn’t the same, but it was similar.”
She also mentions that, under the Immigration & Naturalization Act of 1965 — which bans the discrimination of any immigrant based solely on national origin — Trumps actions could be deemed illegal.
Castleton University graduate, Acacia Ladd-Cocca, feels Trump’s order treats humans as trash we can just throw away.
“These are human beings. People with feelings, fears, hopes, dreams, etc. They are not animals or a waste of life. They are not ALL dangerous,” she said. “I have seen more violence on the news from young, white males over Islamic terrorists. This is pure hatred for anyone who is different and it has to stop. Banning any specific race, ethnicity, gender, etc. will only brew more hate and hostility from any other country, even our own.”
Former infantryman, Kamal Darji, believes there is a lot of fear mongering that has lead us to believe most people from those seven countries are terrorists.
“Our job [in the military] is to kill so we have to be in that mindset. They train us with that sort of mindset. Absolutely there are people in those countries that want to kill us. But they’re not representative of the whole. America is the melting pot, the land of freedom and opportunity. A lot of innocent people trying to better their lives come from those countries.”
Bagdadi and Alkattan both agree the only positive thing to come out of all of this is the outpouring of support from people around the world. People from all ethnicities, religions and sexualities are coming together to voice their support of those seven countries and their strong disapproval of these executive orders.
With just the protest at USF alone you could see hundreds of whites, blacks, hispanics, muslims, christians, gays and straights. People of all different cultures and heritages coming together to support those seven Muslim countries.