Travel ban keeping families apart

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Eight-year-old Mutaz cries when he sees his classmates with their mothers at teacher conferences. His 9-year-old brother, Adel, gets into trouble at school.

In hourslong weekend calls with their mother, the children always have the same question: When are you coming to America?

It’s a question with no answer. Their mother, Amena Abdulkarem, is stuck in Yemen with her two younger sons, the boys’ brothers. She’s been waiting three years for a visa to come to the U.S> to join her husband, Sadek Ahmed, and the children.

Their family’s situation is representative of the toll that the Trump administration’s travel ban has taken on an untold number of families. Ahmed, a 31-year-old school maintenance worker in New York and a U.S. citizen, and other Americans with relatives from countries targeted by the ban see no end to their separations. And they say they have no idea how to get a coveted waiver created, but seldom issued, by the government.

The Trump administration issued a third version of the ban in December 2017, blocking citizens of five Muslim-majority countries and their immediate families from traveling or immigrating to the United States. The ban – which affects Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and government representatives from Venezuela – was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018.

The measure has devastated not only overseas relatives who have been unable to visit family in the United States but also American citizens such as Ahmed – husbands who have been separated from wives and parents from children.

The administration announced that waivers would be granted on an individual basis so long as doing so did not threaten national security. But immigrants and their advocates contend there’s no formal system to apply for a waiver, and they have sued the government in federal courts in California and New York.