Prior to the November election, the Associated Press is examining some of Trump’s immigration policy changes, from avoiding asylum to fleeing America’s humanitarian role.
The pain caused by the dismantling of the 40-year-old refugee program is resonating around the world, with a record 80 million people displaced by war and hunger.
They come with an Iraqi woman who can’t go to the United States even though her father helped the U. S. military. But it’s not the first time And a woman in Uganda who couldn’t sign up for her husband near Seattle despite a court rule that requires cases like hers to be expedited.
“My young people here cry every single night, my wife cries in Uganda every single night,” said Congolese refugee Sophonie Bizimana, a permanent resident of the United States who doesn’t know why his wife isn’t with his family. “I want her, young children love her.
Trump has reduced the restriction on refugee admission during the year of his presidency to a record 15,000 by 2021.
The State Department defended cuts as protective jobs in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, said the administration was looking for refugees to settle closer to their home countries and paintings of the crises that led them to flee.
“This challenge cannot be solved through America’s internal resettlement. The solution will have to be a foreign policy,” Miller told AP.
The administration also reduced eligibility this year, restricting refugees elected for resettlement to certain categories, adding those persecuted for their faith and Iraqis whose assistance to the United States put them at risk.
Democratic lawmakers denounced the reduction of the limit and said the categories excluded many of those most in need. Democrat Joe Biden promises to raise the annual refugee limit to 125,000 if he wins on November 3.
Up to 1,000 refugees who were willing to do so now may not be eligible because they have no compatibility in one of the categories, said Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a refugee resettlement group. For example, many Syrians may no longer be eligible because there are no categories for those fleeing war, he said.
Even those who qualify have their instances blocked because the already extensive measures have become extreme. For example, refugees will now have to provide addresses dating back 10 years, a task that is almost less likely for others living in exile, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Trump’s leadership has also revoked other humanitarian coverage, such as the prestige of transitory coverage for 400,000 immigrants fleeing violence or screw-ups.
Nationals of countries such as Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Nepal and Syria are now under threat of deportation as part of a plan to end the program in January, including Lili Montalvan, who arrived from El Salvador at the age of 16 a quarter. a century ago.
He lives in Miami and has a 6-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old son who are U. S. citizens. You can’t believe you raised your youngest son in El Salvador. His father was sent back to Peru last year.
“We have children, we have houses, we are from this country,” said Montalvan, who cleans houses and sells baked goods.
The administration’s efforts to drastically curb immigration and immigration have sparked a series of lawsuits.
Bizimana, the Congolese refugee, was a plaintiff in a case settled on February 10 through a federal court in Seattle, which required the government to expedite the processing of some three hundred families, but more than 8 months after the legal victory, he is still waiting for his wife to enroll in his place, and no one can tell him why.
Since his arrival in 2014, Bizimana has triumphed over obstacles at each and every level of his quest to reunite his family.
After a son’s arrival in 2016, the door closed for everyone in October 2017, when the Trump administration suspended refugee admissions for 4 months and then demanded more checks on spouses and youth who were about to enroll for their families in the United States.
After a federal ruling on limited restrictions in December 2017, seven of his children were admitted, but not their mothers. The International Rescue Committee, the resettlement firm that helped Bizimana, said the reasons for the heist were unclear.
He’s the only one with the answers.
Around the world, an Iraqi woman whose father helped the U. S. military does not know why her case has stagnated and spoke under anonymity for fear that her circle of relatives would still be in danger.
His father worked intensively with the U. S. military as an Iraqi government official and due to the relationship, U. S. army doctors agreed to treat his two rare diseases, one of which was an attack on his immune formula opposite his organs.
But her regular visits to U. S. bases caused militia death threats in her Baghdad neighborhood, and she and her circle of relatives fled to Jordan in 2016.
Since then, the 51-year-old mother has waited for the United States, where she has a brother in Syracuse, New York. Her circle of family members was questioned through US officials and her background check completed.
The new York-based allocation of foreign refugee assistance that assisted him closed the case in 2019 because there is nothing else I can do, case manager Ra’ed Almasri said.
“I’ve been running with those other people for 3 years, and they haven’t made a decision yet, and yet this is a case with someone who has medical problems, their circle of relatives has helped the US military. But it’s not the first time And he’s been through so many things,” he told me. “I don’t see why he hasn’t moved on. “
The woman texts Almasri every few weeks to ask for news.
His circle of relatives lived first of the savings, then with the help of his pahirs until he ran out when his father died. She sold some of her gold jewelry to pay the rent for her modest apartment home.
It has been so long since her ID with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has expired, meaning she can no longer comply with her legal right to be in Jordan and fears being deported to Iraq.
“This is our fifth year in Jordan, we are running out of money, we hope to receive the news very soon,” said the woman.
Life is more complicated for more than 750,000 refugees in Jordan amid the coronavirus pandemic, many cannot paint or even leave their neighborhoods in Amman, where official checkpoints have cordoned off spaces to curb spread.
Almasri, the social worker, said the depression was so acute that some had tried to kill themselves.
“People feel stagnant,” Almasri said, “they’re already in a complicated situation and now they see things getting worse. “
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Snow brought from Phoenix and Watson from San Diego. Associated Press hounds Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to the report.
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