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refugees
The Jingoist States of America: Our Cruel Mistreatment of Asylum Seekers
At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. The plight of refugees—and how we treat them as a society—is a story that connects us all.
Apr 20, 2026
In late March, I sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court for the first time in my life. Throughout my 30 years of grassroots anti-poverty work, I’ve joined countless protests and vigils outside the Court. In 2018, I was even arrested and held in detention for praying on its palatial steps. Now, I was seated with a clear view of the nine justices of the nation’s highest court. I was there as a guest of immigrant rights lawyers, as their team made oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the most significant case on the right to asylum in decades.
In February, the Kairos Center (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus brief on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide. Those groups, including the Alliance of Baptists, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Hindus for Human Rights, the Latino Christian National Network, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reconstructing Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, and the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, joined together to declare that our societal obligation to provide for persecuted outsiders is a universally shared moral principle.
Although the case has largely flown under the public radar, there is indeed a lot at stake. Filed on behalf of asylum seekers, Noem v. Al Otro Lado focuses on the legality of a 2018 Trump border policy blocking access to the U.S. asylum process for people arriving at the border with Mexico. Immigrant rights advocates argue that such a turnback policy, under which immigration officers physically stop people seeking safety at official border crossings from setting foot on U.S. soil, flouts decades of settled federal immigration law and our society’s most deeply held legal and moral values.
For more than a century, the government has been required to undertake a legal process of inspection when people seek asylum at official ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border (as they must inspect all noncitizens seeking admission to the United States). That requirement is supposed to ensure that this country doesn’t send vulnerable people back into danger without first allowing them to seek protection. A wide range of immigration lawyers and legal experts argue that the first Trump administration’s turnback policy, euphemistically called “metering,” directly undermined the government’s responsibility to process such asylum claims. As a result, vulnerable children, families, and adults were regularly forced to remain indefinitely stranded in perilous conditions in Mexico.
Although the turnback policy has not been in effect since 2021, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared it unlawful, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the case. Should the government win (which is all too possible given the hyperpartisan nature of the current Court), the consequences are sure to be grave and far-reaching. The Department of Homeland Security would have the legal backing to turn away untold thousands of desperate people at the border, potentially clearing the way for even more expansive border closures, while further intensifying the jingoistic nationalism that defines the Trump administration. Alongside other landmark cases this term, like Trump v. Barboza, in which the government seeks to undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the results of Noem v. Al Otro Lado are likely to reveal the lengths to which the Supreme Court is willing to backstop the president’s assault on democracy, including accelerated attacks on the rights of vulnerable populations.
The day I was there, the existential stakes of that case and the larger societal crisis in which it was unfolding did not seem to concern the court’s conservative justices. I had the words of George Washington (written in 1788 to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp) in my mind as I sat in the gallery: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”
Unfortunately, having heard the statements and reactions of some of the judges, I fear that the majority of the Supreme Court may no longer agree with that foundational vision for this country.
Courtroom Friezes and Draconian Law
The first thing that struck me on entering the Supreme Court gallery were the stone friezes on the walls of the room. Designed by Adolf Weinman more than a century ago, those large marble reliefs, featuring what he called the “great lawgivers of history,” tower over the space. Among them are prominent religious figures like Moses (holding a scroll of the Ten Commandments), King Solomon, Confucius, and a rendition of the Prophet Muhammad (that is entirely unrecognizable). The friezes also include Roman Emperor Octavian (otherwise known as Caesar Augustus, Jesus’s great nemesis), French King Louis IX (leader of the seventh and eighth crusades), and Draco (a Greek jurist whose legacy lurks in the word “draconian” because of the extreme measures he took to punish minor offenses).
As I stared at those figures, I reflected on the message they convey about the complex civilizational lineages from which the Supreme Court and our legal system derive their authority. In our amicus brief, we reflected on those varied lineages as they pertain to the right to seek asylum:
“Our asylum laws are the modern embodiment of a deeply rooted religious, cultural, and historical heritage that has consistently affirmed society’s obligation to provide refuge for those seeking safety. Asylum reaches back to some of the earliest moments of recorded human history. It was practiced throughout the ancient civilizations that forged the foundation of Western society. This tradition can also be found in the form of church sanctuary asylum, a mainstay of European culture for over a millennium.
“Our very nation began as a haven for persecuted political and religious minorities. This tradition is present throughout our history, from the practices of Native Americans to the Underground Railroad to modern times. Congress adopted our current asylum laws in significant part due to the efforts of faith-based groups seeking to uphold deeply held societal, moral, and cultural principles.”
Despite such deeply held and ancient principles, I couldn’t shake a sense of impending doom as I scanned the faces on the friezes and those of the justices. I thought of the awesome and awful power of Rome, depicted throughout the gallery, and its draconian reign of “peace” (or what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently termed “delivering peace through strength”). And I recalled the worsening anti-democratic and pro-oligarchic turn our own Supreme Court has taken in the Trump era.
Just consider the rulings from the past few years: the Court has essentially given immunity to the executive branch (although the Court is supposed to be a critical part of a federal system of checks and balances), criminalized homelessness (although the U.S. claims to be a nation of opportunity and prosperity for all), and degraded voting rights (cutting off the legs of our democracy).
Before oral arguments began in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, I was under no illusion that the Supreme Court delivers equality, freedom, and justice for all. And yet, on an issue as basic and legally sound as the right to seek asylum, I was still shocked by the flippancy of the court’s conservative judges. For hours, they rocked in their chairs, physically broadcasting their disinterest in the case. Rather than take seriously more than 100 years of legal precedent and hundreds more of long-established societal practice, they seemed to enjoy getting into hyper-specific and cherrypicked semantic and rhetorical arguments with Kelsi Brown Cochran, our lawyer.
In preparation for that day, I had brushed up on the history of U.S. asylum law. An important story in that history is the S.S. St. Louis, a ship that in 1939 was carrying 930 refugees from Hamburg, Germany, fleeing the Nazi regime, who were first denied entry to Cuba and then to the United States, only to be returned to Europe, where many of them were taken to the Nazi death camps.
Reflecting on that story at a pre-hearing press conference, Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, a plaintiff in the case, offered this explanation:
“The right to seek asylum is not a policy preference or a loophole — it is a legal right and a moral commitment forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Seeking asylum is not like taking a number at a deli counter and waiting for your turn. You cannot ask someone fleeing rape, torture, or death threats to wait in danger indefinitely because a government has decided their lives are inconvenient. We filed this case because the United States has an obligation to follow its own laws — laws duly enacted by Congress. The question before the Court is whether those laws can be set aside by executive action, or whether they remain binding at the border, as written.”
In their apparent willingness to flout precedent and condemn modern-day asylees to harm or even death, the conservative justices unselfconsciously aligned themselves with American nativism and European fascism of the 1930s. If, in their final decision, they uphold Trump’s turnback policy, they will be affirming that, were the S.S. St Louis to sail again today, the ship would still be denied entry and its passengers asylum.
The Moral Crisis Is Not “Border Surges” But the Closing of the Border
The morning of those oral arguments, the Kairos Center and other faith organizations held an interfaith prayer vigil on the steps of the Supreme Court to call attention to the case. Reverend Michael Neuroth, director of the United Church of Christ’s Washington D.C. office, put the matter vividly: “Welcoming and protecting the stranger is not a minor tenet of our faith but is a foundational moral obligation in each of our traditions. Dismantling the right to asylum is morally wrong, strategically short-sighted, and increases insecurity here in our nation. We must be a nation of compassion, a place of refuge to those in need.”
The vigil was organized in the heart of the “holy season” amid Ramadan, Passover, and Easter. As billions of people globally engage in rituals of remembrance, repentance, deliverance, and liberation, our prayers and petitions focused not only on the legal precedent for the right to seek asylum, but on the moral imperative to do so. For Christians, protecting and welcoming the immigrant is one of Jesus’s first and most powerful teachings. It’s also among the highest moral commands of the Torah. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “Do no wrong to the foreigner and do not shed innocent blood.” Asylum and societal hospitality are well-recognized rights within Islamic law and theology, a fundamental Hindu and Buddhist tenet, and part of Native American spiritual teachings.
In our interfaith amicus brief, we wrote: “As the many faiths practiced by this country’s citizens teach, a society that does not protect the least among us is a failed society.” As faith leaders, we had in mind not only the right to seek asylum, but the many ways the Trump administration has deepened and intensified a moral crisis at the heart of our society. We were thinking about the ongoing attacks on immigrant communities — from ICE-led campaigns of terror to family and child detention in places like Dilley, Texas. There was also the stripping of life-saving healthcare and food support from millions of Americans through cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); the criminalization and forced deprivation of LGBTQ+ people; and the prosecution of anillegal war that threatens the lives of so many in Iran and the broader region, as well as the livelihoods of billions of us across this globe.
In Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration is attempting to mask its cruelty and despotism through banal legal arguments. By focusing semantically on when protections start for asylum seekers and debating the meaning of the term “arrives in” (as in this country, of course), its lawyers were ignoring the illegality and immorality of border agents blocking asylum seekers from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and the larger question of whether the United States can any longer be a place of safety and protection for all families “yearning to be free” of violence and persecution.
The government is, of course, hoping that we don’t make the connections between the stripping away of asylum rights, the larger issue of immigrant rights, and the many other ways that it’s targeting “the least among us.” That’s a mistake we can’t make and where the teachings of our many faith traditions have encouragement to offer. In Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and more, love, justice, and peace are not parceled out only for certain people in certain places. Across our religions, all life is sacred, full stop!
No Turning Back for Anyone
Intermixed with the important lawgivers of history in that marble frieze in the Supreme Court gallery are engraved winged personifications of “Peace,” “The Rights of Man,” “History,” “Authority,” “Fame,” and more. Those winged characters form what looked to me like a Greco-Roman “choir of angels,” proclaiming “law and order” at the expense of rights and dignity for us all.
Sitting there, I reflected on just who was not in that room listening to those arguments or forcing the Supreme Court justices to face the very lives impacted by their decision. I thought about all those who will never have access to that courtroom, or justice of any sort for that matter, the millions of people struggling to fight for their communities and a future where everybody is in and nobody is out.
Those people are — or at least should be — our hope. They are the true “choir of angels” who came out for the recent No Kings Day demonstrations and are standing up for the rights and dignity of communities all over the country. They are also the people who are increasingly giving Donald Trump historically low approval ratings. And here’s the truth of these times: this administration has nothing to offer everyday people, other than hardened borders and wars that nobody wants.
At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. Therefore, it seems fitting that the coalition that came together to fight this case and protect the rights of asylum seekers calls itself “No Turning Back.” It reminds me of a song by Emma’s Revolution that I’ve sung many times at protests and gatherings. Its key lines are a reminder of what we all need to keep in mind in this deeply disturbing Trumpian moment of ours:
“Gonna keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Never turning back
Never turning back”
Because indeed, there can be no turning back for any of us. Either we get there together or we never get there at all.
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Human Rights Groups Denounce Trump Plans to Send Cubans Fleeing Impacts of Blockade to Guantánamo
“The continued use of Guantánamo Bay, which has an extensive history of abuse and torture, is horrific and unconscionable."
Apr 10, 2026
Dozens of human rights organizations sent a letter to Congress on Friday, decrying threats by US military officials to detain Cubans who flee to the US to escape President Donald Trump's crushing economic blockade at Guantánamo Bay.
The 86 groups, which include the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Victims of Torture, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and Refugees International, zeroed in on remarks made by US Marine Corps Gen. Francis Donovan, the commander of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month about how the military would respond to the mass influx of Cuban refugees to the United States.
The risks of a refugee exodus from Cuba were sparked in January after Trump tightened the already brutal regime of economic sanctions by threatening to slap harsh tariffs on any nation that provided oil to Cuba. The result has been a crippling fuel shortage that has caused routine blackouts and disrupted every facet of daily life, from hospital care to food cultivation.
Trump enacted the fuel blockade in what he has described as an effort to coerce the government to step down from power and make way for one more amenable to the interests of American companies. With Cuba in a weakened state, he has threatened to "take" the island outright using American military force.
The United Nations has warned that if the blockade is prolonged, it could bring about a total "humanitarian collapse.”
Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) about what would be done if this caused a mass influx of Cuban refugees to the US, Donovan said they had an executive order that would involve coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security to handle a "mass migration event."
Donovan said it would include using the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, “where we would set up a camp to deal with those migrants or any overflow from any situation in Cuba itself.”
“Given the well-documented history of abusive and unlawful detention at Guantánamo, any proposal to use the base for additional detention is deeply troubling and unacceptable," the organizations wrote on Friday,
They note the prison’s history as a site used for extrajudicial torture during the global War on Terror and as a holding facility for other migrant groups, including Haitian refugees and asylum seekers who fled a military coup in the 1990s, many of whom were subjected to substandard living conditions.
"Time and again, we have seen the US government try to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole to mistreat migrants, subjecting them to inhumane conditions and interfering with both their right to seek protection in the United States and their right to counsel," said Pedro Sepulveda, a litigation fellow for the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Despite pledges from multiple presidents to close the camp for good, it remains open more than two decades after former President George W. Bush began using it to detain hundreds of terrorism suspects without trial.
Trump has expanded its use during his second term, using it to temporarily hold more than 700 migrants since February 2025—including dozens of Cubans rounded up by immigration agents.
Trump’s use of the camp marks the first time it has been used to hold people detained in the continental United States. A Washington Post investigation from February found that those in the facility were subject to weeks-long periods of isolation, invasive strip searches, and denied contact with lawyers.
The human rights groups called on Congress to block any funding that could be used to detain Cubans fleeing Trump's blockade and to shut down Guantánamo Bay for good.
"The president has held Guantánamo detention as a threat over the heads of migrants in the United States and now threatens the same over Cubans who may be forced to flee their homes as a result of his own actions," said Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Victims of Torture.
Michael Galant, the senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said, “If the Trump administration is worried about Cuban migration, the solution is simple: Stop intentionally impoverishing the Cuban people through an embargo and fuel blockade.”
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Listening to the People on the Other Side of US Bombs
As the US launches another illegal war in the Middle East, an author recalls what she learned from Iraqis who had lived through George W. Bush's invasion of their country.
Apr 01, 2026
I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least $1 billion a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the US into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the US will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.
I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.
Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.
The US might have toppled Saddam Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship.
Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.
Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour by hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a US bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.
Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days—jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family—in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.
Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.
One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.
A Bloody Mess
President Bush’s war in Iraq quickly became a bloody mess. As I (and many others) documented, the US might have toppled Saddam Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some 1 million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children, and displaced 4 million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by The Lancet medical journal, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. In short, 1 of every 5 Iraqis was forced from his or her home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon.
The US not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with sanctions, poisoned it with depleted uranium, destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East, and women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women’s rights, had been undone.
Today, women’s rights in Iraq have eroded even further and women are now relegated to second-class citizenship. Just this March 2, the most prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested—and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.
While the US war machine was busy destroying Iraq and we were hearing all too little from Iraqis themselves, Americans at home were being bombarded with ever more movies (think Hurt Locker and American Sniper, for instance), books, TV series, and news stories about the heroism of US soldiers at war, as well as their traumas and struggles on returning home.
Harry Potter
Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling. So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas (called SIVs) reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the US military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala. (I’m withholding their last names for their safety.)
Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn’t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the US with the help of his widow.
Nour and I met in New York City and had lunch a few times. Small and slight, with an angular face and haunted eyes, she was reserved and visibly fragile, but her bravery was unmistakable. She refused to be pitied and, in spite of all she had been through and the dangers she would face there, wanted more than anything in the world to go home.
Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so.
Hala, the other unforgettable Iraqi woman I met, had fled Baghdad with her husband and children about a year before we met in 2010. The day I arrived at their apartment in a suburb of Albany, New York, he was at his job far away in New Jersey, work he had found only after 10 months of searching. But Hala, who was working as a substitute schoolteacher, was at home with her daughter, Hiba, who was 20, and her son, Mustafa, who had just turned 9. As I speak no Arabic, I was grateful that they were all fluent in English.
“Come in, come in,” Hala said when she opened the door, ushering me in with a smile and showing me to a chair in her immaculate, if somewhat bare, white living room. A round, energetic woman with a kind, if worn, face, she settled onto her sofa and sent her daughter to make the chai (tea). “Mustapha,” she said to her serious-eyed son, “this lady is a writer. She is from England.” (I am British and sound it, although I have lived in the US for many decades.)
His eyes grew big. “You wrote Harry Potter!” he declared. It was not a question. I tried to disabuse him of the idea but he refused to believe me. “I’m a writer, too,” he said. “Want to see?” He ran out to fetch his book—a sheaf of stapled papers he had made in school. “It’s about bad GIs and good GIs.” On each page, he had drawn soldiers and a sky raining with bombs.
After we had settled down comfortably with our tea, Hala told me that she and her husband had both been engineers, a highly respected profession in Iraq, and had hated Saddam Hussein, but had lived a pleasant enough life. Her daughter Hiba had been studying to be a dentist, and their two young sons were in school. “Baghdad was beautiful to us then,” Hala told me wistfully. “Looking back now, it was like that movie Avatar, that world of paradise before the invasion.”
But then the US did invade, their jobs disappeared, and money ran low, so her husband became an interpreter for US officials. Soon afterward, Hala’s brother was killed in retribution. Then, their middle child was kidnapped and murdered (by whom they never knew). He was only 15.
“Every day for a year, Hiba dreamed that she went home and found her brother there,” Hala told me quietly, while Hiba listened without saying a word. “She could not eat or get up or get dressed.” So, in the end, they fled to Jordan to escape the violence and find Hiba therapy, eventually obtaining a visa to the US, where Hala and her husband hoped their children would be able to forge better and safer futures.
“And how is that going?” I asked.
“I like school,” Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days—against all Arabs, in fact—and she was spared little of it.
“Some of them don’t like me because they know I’m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I’m Hispanic,” she said, her pretty face rueful, and with a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.
The Visas That Are No More
Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the US now are just about zero. The Trump administration has banned refugees, asylum-seekers, or any immigrants from 75 countries—including Iraq.
In light of this, I look back with nostalgia on the time I spent with Riverbend, Nour, and Hala, when Barack Obama was still president and Donald Trump had yet to loom all too large in our lives. And I can’t stop thinking about what Hala said when I apologized for what my country had done to hers.
She looked at me and nodded. “Mustafa, come sit on my lap.” She motioned to her son. “Listen to this lady, so you will know that not all Americans wanted that war.”
He nestled into her lap, his sister sat on another chair, and they all gazed at me, waiting.
Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the United States, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.
Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified. What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn’t my son and brother who’d been killed. It wasn’t my life that had been torn away. It wasn’t my country that had been ruined.
Yet they continued to be kind. After I had recovered and we had spoken for a few hours, I asked Hala, “How can you stand living here with your former enemy? Aren’t you angry at us Americans?”
She shook her head. “No, no, my friend.” She smiled at me kindly. “We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.”
I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.
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