The Pointless Cruelty of the Travel Ban
YemenExtra
SH.A.
By
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of the many cases of needless hardship created by the Trump administration’s travel ban:
The Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old boy on life support in an Oakland hospital is being prevented from coming to the country to say goodbye to her son by the Trump administration ban on travel from certain Muslim countries, the child’s family says.
Abdullah Hassan was born in Yemen with a rare brain disease that initially affected his ability to walk and talk but quickly worsened. He is no longer able to breathe on his own. His father, a U.S. citizen who lives in Stockton, brought him to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland for care about five months ago, and Abdullah is not expected to live much longer.
The parents are ready to take Abdullah off life support, but they want his mother to have one more moment to hold him. So far, the U.S. State Department has ignored their pleas for a waiver to get her into the United States, they say.
There is no good reason to bar this woman from coming to see her son before he dies. The idea that keeping her from coming to the U.S. has anything to do with national security is an insulting joke. There is no serious national security justification for the ban, and if anyone deserves to be granted a waiver it would be a mother trying to see her dying child. This is just the latest case that illustrates the pointless cruelty of the travel ban, whose costs are borne by innocent people from the targeted countries and their American relatives.
The inclusion of Yemen on the travel ban has meant that people trying to flee from the destruction and starvation inflicted on their country by the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition war are frequently trapped in limbo. Returning to the disaster engulfing Yemen isn’t safe, but they are usually stuck in whichever country they went to in order to obtain a visa. Mallory Moench reported on this earlier this year:
After the Supreme Court’s decision, Alafif now faces an agonizing choice: Wait in Djibouti with little hope of ever receiving a visa, or return to a war zone, where she fears her older sons will be recruited to fight.
“It’s an unknown future – in between two fires – traveling back to Yemen and staying over here to bear expenses in Djibouti,” she said.
These Yemenis are effectively refugees without the protections that are supposed to go with that status. There are many other cases of Yemenis trapped in Djibouti because they have been barred from joining their families. Some had fled Yemen and ended up being stranded in another country on their way here, and many of their relatives in the U.S. are struggling to pay for their needs in Djibouti. Dozens of Yemenis who traveled abroad on the assumption that they would be granted green cards have been left in the lurch in Malaysia. The U.S. is willing to support the destruction of their homeland and the starvation of their countrymen, but it won’t take in those trying to flee from the devastation.