The cuts didn’t affect just new arrivals. Refugees qualified for services for the first five years after they arrived in the country; most agencies, if they had the funding and capacity, would offer that help longer if they could, especially for more vulnerable populations. Those services included English classes and mental health counseling and employment help. When sites closed and agencies were forced to make choices about what they could offer, the repercussions for traumatized people whom the United States committed to support were instantaneous.
The radio program This American Life documented the last week for an International Rescue Committee office in Garden City, Kansas. The producer, Zoe Chace, recorded site manager Amy Longa as she tried to wrap up the work of an office that was an integral part of the community. Amy could not finish packing up the office because people kept coming in and asking questions:
How do I get a birth certificate for my new baby daughter? How much does it cost? How is my green card application doing? . . . How much is it to go to the dentist? Should I pull this tooth out of my mouth? If I pull the tooth, should I replace it with a new tooth or leave the gap? And what will people around here think if I have a gap? Is that bad? Where is the dentist’s office?
As Chace noticed, “Amy has this ability where it’s like she imagines all the thoughts in their head. She can picture the entire thought process of the person who’s sitting in front of her.” A former refugee herself, Amy knew how to be empathetic, capable, kind, efficient, firm, and loving all at once. The tacit knowledge in her mind—the ability to intuit what her clients were going to ask or need—could not be replicated. For most people who stayed in it for any amount of time, resettlement work became more of a calling than a job. The loss of Amy Longa and hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced caseworkers and administrators like her was a devastating blow to the entire process.
* * *
—
What made it especially difficult was that the Trump administration continued to invoke the same lofty, inspiring language of every president since Truman. In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the Presidential Determination for a devastatingly limited refugee admissions ceiling of 30,000 refugees.
In his speech, he conflated two separate admissions processes, referring to 310,000 refugees and asylum seekers who would come to the United States as if they arrived through the same program. The 30,000 refugees accepted for resettlement came through the Refugee Admissions Process. The 280,000 asylum seekers were part of a different, discrete route; mostly from Central America, their cases would go through the US immigration courts and the vast majority would never be considered for asylum. But putting the two together masked the stark deviation from previous administrations’ tactics—those who were unaware of the resettlement figures under the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations might think 310,000 was on par with or even ahead of those decades. It certainly sounded impressive.
Pompeo also borrowed statistics from the Bush and Obama administrations to note “the over 800,000 asylum seekers who are already inside the United States and who are awaiting adjudication of their claims,” as well as “over one and a half million people . . . admitted as refugees or granted asylum” since 2000, and the “hundreds of thousands of people who have received temporary and permanent humanitarian protection under other immigration categories such as victims of trafficking, humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, and special immigrant” visas. He touted “these expansive figures” that demonstrated “the United States’ long-standing record as the most generous nation in the world when it comes to protection-based immigration and assistance”—while he announced cuts that took the once-generous resettlement program to a new historic low.
* * *
—
Following that announcement, even more agencies shuttered. Not all organizations had a closure as dramatic as that of the IRC in Garden City, Kansas. Some of the sites shifted their focus to other vulnerable populations. Caritas of Austin, an affiliate of Catholic Charities and one of two agencies working in Austin, Texas, announced in September 2018 it would no longer accept refugees for resettlement. Only a few years before, the nonprofit employed twenty-seven staffers serving as case managers, or employment and education specialists; by 2018, there were five staffers left who had worked with refugees and they focused on Austin’s homeless populations by the end of the year. In October 2018, Refugee Services of Texas—now the only affiliate agency serving refugees in Austin—did an internal analysis that showed they could make it for two more years at their current budget without losing any of their staff. As RST CEO Russell Smith put it, the goal for the nonprofit was to “survive until we can thrive. . . . By 2021, we need to be able to ramp up.”
That sentiment echoed across refugee resettlement agencies—the desire to hunker down and wait out the changes in a way that would allow agencies to be prepared for an eventual uptick in resettlement. The bureaucratic connections and processes that had taken years to develop would take time to reinstitute if and when the US could begin accepting refugees at the rate it once did. Private donations made up for some of the losses from the cut federal funds, but the years were lean ones for the volags and affiliates that did manage to keep their doors open. One anonymous source estimated that there were eighty-six sites total that had either closed or shifted away from refugee assistance by early 2019: 25 percent of the once-thriving, well-protected humanitarian agencies in cities across the United States.
The Trump administration took aim at various aspects of the refugee process. Officials publicly toyed with the idea of moving the Bureau of Populations, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) from the State Department to another agency, an idea that refugee advocates managed to successfully petition first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to do. A planned closure of twenty-three USCIS field offices in twenty different countries in early 2019 would hold up a significant number of refugee applications at the earliest stages. The administration’s proposed 2020 budget called for a 90 percent reduction to PRM’s budget. As of the writing of this book, the administration was reportedly considering zero refugee admissions for its 2020 Presidential Determination. No matter the number that would be proposed, the Trump administration effectively demonstrated its intention to stop or slow resettlement with every tool in its arsenal: bureaucratic, rhetorical, political, and financial.
Those refugees who could no longer reunite with their families or who were no longer eligible for resettlement in the United States were not the only ones these lowered numbers and focused closures affected. Since 1948, restrictionist and liberalizer presidential administrations had raised and lowered the cap. They paroled in displaced persons or ended programs in response to specific crises. They advocated fiercely for some refugees while ignoring the plight of others based on US foreign policy interests. There were many shifts and changes in the more than seven decades of focusing on refugees as a group of immigrants with a unique set of considerations.
Still, the actions of the Trump administration were truly unprecedented: for the first time in history, the government branch tasked with overseeing the refugee admissions process instead brought the entire resettlement system to the edge of collapse.
Chapter 30
HASNA
AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JANUARY–JULY 2017
Amal told Hasna over video chat they had already begun the first security screening, which meant they were reaching the end of the process. Her earliest estimate for the date when Amal and her family might arrive was March. Every day, Hasna eyed her neighbors, wondering if any of them were going to move. Even with her job and Jebreel’s disability checks, they still barely had enough money every month to pay for rent and groceries and bills and their debt to the US government. Still, she managed to set a little bit aside every month to save for some good dishes for Amal and clothes for the children
. Natheir told her that he had friends who would help them get better furniture than the particle-board table—Hasna wanted Amal’s family to begin their new lives with some things that could last.
Yusef and Laila continued to move to various places in Turkey, staying first with one friend and then another. There was a time when the fact that Laila was a widow might have been cause for other people to help her, but now most Syrian women were widows, most children half orphans. Hamad and Tawfiq were whiny. Over video chat, Hasna could tell Laila was stressed that they had to continue to impose on other people’s hospitality. Hasna tried to amuse the boys, showing them her apartment and the neighborhood kids playing on their bikes outside the picture window. Perhaps they would get Laila’s boys bikes when they arrived, she told them. Laila laughed—her face was so young when she smiled—and said she hoped that would be true. She could not wait for that day.
Rana was still struggling in school. She could not understand the English words and there was much she had to catch up on. More difficult for her were the lack of other young women in hijabs at school. They had always lived in Muslim countries; the stares of people around them took some getting used to, and at seventeen, Rana was at an age when she was profoundly uncomfortable with being different. It was not that she thought about taking off her hijab, which she’d been wearing since she was in Ramtha, but that she resented other people for not realizing it was normal. A girl in her ESL class asked her one day why she wore it and she tried to explain that it was a sign of her devotion to God, but the girl argued with her and told her that she was oppressed. Rana had to look the word up later and it upset her.
She and Hasna talked about it that night, now more like friends than mother and daughter. The Americans they met seemed to think that Syria was full of terrorists and that women were being abused. Hasna found it confusing—Syria had always been a warm and open society, where Christians and Muslims and Druze, Circassians and Kurds, blended their lives beautifully. Muslim women were not judged for leaving their heads uncovered—hijabs were almost taboo in the years Hasna was having babies, when she had left her hair uncovered and worn miniskirts. Later, as the association with the Muslim Brotherhood faded and it became more acceptable to show outward forms of religion, more and more women wore the hijab while others chose not to, and both decisions were fine.
Hasna hated that this war had erased the good things in Syria, that people only knew about her country because of the refugee crisis. She wished she had the words to tell people in English that the word “Syria” was not one to invoke pity or fear. It tasted like honey on her tongue.
Things were easier for Rana in the apartment complex. Hasna was glad she was making friends. Several of the families had young girls around Rana’s age and they met with other young women at a club for refugee teenagers. Hasna liked that strong, devout young Syrian women surrounded her daughter at home.
* * *
—
On a cold Friday night at the end of January, Hasna walked into the apartment, shaking off the cold. The space was too full of men. She wished again for the large, comfortable living space in Daraa, where the men would have reclined on her velvety Persian rugs against low pillows. She would have served them tea on her filigreed brass tray. She tucked the wish away. This was where she was and what she had. She greeted them and began walking to the back to hang up her coat in her room.
“Hasna!” Jebreel’s voice was sharp but his eyes were not on her, they were on his phone. She realized that she had been thinking about smoke and couches and not noticing the mood in the room—the men were on the edges of their seats.
“What? What’s going on?” Hasna had her arm out of her coat sleeve when there was a knock on the door and Um Khalid walked in without waiting to be bid. Her husband, Abu Khalid, was sitting on the couch by some of the other men. A cigarette dangled from his fingertips; his black hair was carefully slicked back to minimize the balding spots on either side.
“Peace be with you, Um Khalid.” Hasna slid the other sleeve of her coat off.
“Peace be with you, Um Yusef. I’m so sorry.” Um Khalid’s sympathetic expression softened her normally sharp features.
“What?”
“Hasna.” Jebreel looked up now. Rana walked in with a tray of tea and Um Khalid moved to take it before Hasna could. In an instant, Hasna registered her pride at Rana’s initiative—the tray was the long clear dish from the inside of their microwave and the teacups were mismatched, but the tea, at least, was stout black tea from Turkey and Rana had sliced bananas, fruit, and grapes artfully onto small plates with forks and napkins—and her slight irritation that Um Khalid felt it was her place to serve in Hasna’s home.
But the other part of her brain was already detaching itself, becoming aware that something had happened. Her family—someone had been killed. She fumbled for a chair, clutching her coat like a baby to her chest.
“Hasna, there’s been an announcement. An official proclamation from the president.”
“It’s an ‘executive order,’” Um Khalid interrupted. Her husband shot her a side glance and she shrugged her shoulders. Hasna’s mouth was open slightly. Were they being sent back to Syria?
“They are not allowing any more Syrians to come to the United States. As of today. Even the ones on the planes are being turned back.”
She tried to focus on Jebreel’s face. She realized there were tears in his eyes.
“But Amal is coming.”
“I know.”
“And Samir. And the girls.”
“Yes.” Now the tears were spilling out of his eyes. Saying their names, she could almost conjure them in her living room.
And if Amal couldn’t come, then Laila . . . “And the boys. And Yusef. And Khassem . . .”
“I know.”
“Here, habibti. Drink your tea.” Um Khalid shoved a hot cup of tea, brimful with sugar, into her hand. Hasna gulped it. The liquid scalded her tongue but she felt that if she did not drink it, she might sink into the floor.
Rana came to sit by her and Hasna snuggled her into the crook of her arm. Rana was pale and her body shook occasionally with sobs. And then Hasna sat up.
“No. This can’t be right. They told us. Everyone told us about family reunification . . .”
Abu Khalid hung up the phone and listened to her, but she tapered off. When she did not speak anymore, he nodded as if she had made an excellent point. “Natheir Ali has been on the phone with dozens of people. Abu Adnan’s brother was at the airport in Turkey. They had sold everything and were standing at the airport with their tickets in their hands.” Um Khalid gasped quietly.
“The US has turned them away.”
“They cannot do that.” Hasna was surprised to find that she was the one speaking. She stood up. “They promised us. Those people will have sold all of their possessions and let go of their apartment. They don’t have any place left to go.”
Abu Khalid kept nodding. “And yet, they’ve done this thing. Made this ‘executive order.’ And that means they can do whatever they want.”
Hasna was shaking her head. “I do not believe that this will last. Surely Americans will let them come. They have all of their paperwork. They have one security clearance left.” And she realized she was talking about Amal and not Abu Adnan’s brother and suddenly she was crying into her sleeve and she went to the bathroom, closing the hollow plywood door behind her.
* * *
—
Later, they heard a flurry of stories of horror and hope: Abu Adnan’s brother and family were rerouted and then, after a number of weeks, allowed to finally arrive in Houston—Abu Adnan told them himself. A woman on the plane to Washington, D.C. to join her husband was almost sent back, except a governor and three US senators went down to the airport and demanded she be allowed to stay. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people went to the airport with signs, yelling against th
is travesty—those protests they read about on the news on their phones. Hasna watched video after video of angry Americans—not bombed or gassed by their government, allowed to yell out their rage at this executive order. Hasna took heart in these stories. The American people’s anger at injustice, the people who got through—they made the following weeks bearable.
For the next several weeks, the tension she felt was exactly like what she had endured when her boys were in prison back in Syria. It was as if her body, having the memory of that stress, returned to that state again. Her shoulders were rigid. Her heart raced when she was sitting still. Her back ached, both from her job and from holding her body with such constant stiffness.
One day, she sat down next to a man on the bus and he immediately got up. He was an older white man with a grizzled chin and glasses. He moved to the front of the bus and stood there, glaring at her malevolently.
A few days later, one of her coworkers snapped when Hasna asked whether the new bottles were cleaning fluid—the hotel had switched brands and the colors were different. The woman stood close enough to Hasna that a speck of spit landed on her forehead. “Why don’t you bother to learn our language? You should go back where you came from if you don’t even want to try to speak English.”
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