U.S. policy blocking refugees sets off alarms around world

President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration quickly reverberated through the United States and across the globe Saturday, slamming the border shut for an Iranian scientist headed to a lab in Boston, an Iraqi who had worked for a decade as an interpreter for the U.S. Army, and a Syrian refugee family headed to a new life in Ohio, among countless others.

Around the nation, security officers at major international gateways had new rules to follow, though the application of the order appeared uneven. Humanitarian organizations scrambled to cancel long-planned programs, delivering the bad news to families who were about to travel. Refugees who were on flights when the order was signed were detained at airports.

“We’ve gotten reports of people being detained all over the country,” said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re literally pouring in by the minute.”

There were numerous reports of students attending U.S. universities who were blocked from returning to the United States from visits abroad. One student said in a Twitter post that he would be unable to study at Yale. Another who attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was refused permission to board a plane. A Sudanese student at Stanford University was blocked for hours from returning to California.

Human rights groups reported that legal permanent residents of the United States who hold green cards were being stopped in foreign airports as they sought to return from funerals, vacations or study abroad.

The president’s order, enacted with the stroke of a pen at 4:42 Friday afternoon, suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The Department of Homeland Security said the executive order also barred green card holders from those countries from re-entering the United States. In a briefing for reporters Saturday, White House officials said green card holders from the seven affected countries who are outside the United States would need a case-by-case waiver to return to the United States.

Legal residents who have a green card and are in the United States should meet with a consular officer before leaving the country, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told reporters. Officials did not clarify the criteria that would qualify someone for a waiver from the president’s executive order, which says only that one can be granted when it is “in the national interest.”

Scene at JFK

The week-old administration appeared to be implementing the order chaotically, and agencies and officials around the globe interpreted it in different ways.

The Stanford student, a legal permanent resident of the United States with a green card, was held at Kennedy International Airport in New York for about eight hours but was eventually allowed to fly to California, said Lisa Lapin, a Stanford spokeswoman. Others who were detained appeared to be still in custody or sent back to their home countries.

At least one case prompted a legal challenge as lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy Airport filed a motion early Saturday seeking to have their clients released. They also filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and other immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry.

Shortly after noon Saturday, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, the interpreter who worked on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq, was released. After nearly 19 hours of detention, Darweesh began to cry as he spoke to reporters, putting his hands behind his back and miming handcuffs.

“What I do for this country? They put the cuffs on,” Darweesh said. “You know how many soldiers I touch by this hand?”

The other man the lawyers are representing, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, remained in custody as his legal advocates sought his release.

Lawyers petitioned a federal court early Saturday to let them go. Two Democratic U.S. Representatives, Nydia Velazquez and Jerrold Nalder, were at the airport trying to get about 11 other detainees released, The Associated Press reported.

After he was freed Saturday, Darweesh told a waiting crowd that “America is the greatest nation, the greatest people in the world.”

Peaceful protests began forming Saturday afternoon at Kennedy Airport, where nine travelers had been detained upon arrival at Terminal 7 and two others at Terminal 4, an airport official said.

An official message to all U.S. diplomatic posts around the world provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries affected: “Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance and printing” of visas to the United States.

Panic overseas

Internationally, confusion turned to panic as travelers found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States. In Dubai United Arab Emirates. and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from a flight they had boarded.

A Syrian family of six who have been living in a Turkish refugee camp since fleeing their home in 2014 had been scheduled to arrive in Cleveland on Tuesday, according to a report in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Instead, the family’s trip has been called off.

Danielle Drake, a community relations manager at US Together, a refugee resettlement agency, told the newspaper that Trump’s ban reminded her of when the United States turned away Jewish refugees during World War II. “All those times that people said, ‘Never again,' well, we’re doing it again,” she said.

On Twitter, Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, posted an angry message for Trump after the executive order stopped the arrival of a Syrian family his synagogue had sponsored.

In an interview Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, he expressed sorrow for the fate of the family and apologized for cursing in his Twitter message.

“I can’t quite describe the degree of anger that I felt as a reaction to this, which then caused me to curse at the president on social media,” he said, adding, “which is probably something I should not do as a general rule.”

It was unclear how many refugees and other immigrants were being held nationwide in relation to the executive order.

A Christian family of six from Syria said in an email to Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., that they were being detained at Philadelphia International Airport Saturday morning despite having legal paperwork, green cards and visas that had been approved.

This story was originally published January 28, 2017 at 6:58 PM with the headline "U.S. policy blocking refugees sets off alarms around world."