President Donald Trump’s order closing US borders to refugees has gone into immediate effect, resulting in detentions at US airports of refugees who were in the air on the way to the United States when the order was signed.
The detentions have prompted legal challenges as lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy Airport in New York filed a writ of habeas corpus early Saturday seeking to have their clients released.
At the same time, they filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry.
Trump’s order, which suspends entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, has created a legal limbo for individuals on the way to the United States and panic for families who were awaiting their arrival.
The order also stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and bars entry for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries linked to concerns about terrorism. Those countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
It was unclear how many refugees and immigrants were being held in the aftermath of the order. The complaints were filed by prominent groups including the American Civil Liberties Union.
The lawyers said that one of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the US government in Iraq for 10 years. The other, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife, who had worked for a US contractor, and young son, the lawyers said. They said both men were detained at the airport on Friday night after arriving on separate flights.
The lawyers said they were not allowed to meet with their clients, and there were tense moments as they tried to reach them.
“Who is the person we need to talk to?” asked one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
“Mr President,” said a Customs and Border Protection agent, who declined to identify himself. “Call Mr Trump.”
In the arrivals hall at Terminal 4 of Kennedy Airport, Doss and two other lawyers fought fatigue as they tried to learn the status of their clients on the other side of the security perimeter.
“We’ve never had an issue once one of our clients was at a port of entry in the United States,” Doss said. “To see people being detained indefinitely in the country that’s supposed to welcome them is a total shock.
“These are people with valid visas and legitimate refugee claims who have already been determined by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to be admissible and to be allowed to enter the US and now are being unlawfully detained."
A supervisor for Customs and Border Protection at Kennedy Airport declined to comment, referring questions to public affairs officials. Calls to officials in Washington and New York were not returned early Saturday morning.
According to the filing, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was granted a special immigrant visa on Jan 20, the same day as Trump’s inauguration. He worked with the United States in Iraq in a variety of jobs — as an interpreter, engineer and contractor — over the course of roughly a decade.
Darweesh worked as an interpreter for the Army in Baghdad and Mosul starting shortly after the invasion of Iraq on April 1, 2003. The filing said that he was directly targeted twice for working with the US military.
A husband and father of three, he arrived at Kennedy Airport on Friday evening with his family. Darweesh’s wife and children made it through passport control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection stopped and detained him.
Alshawi was supposed to be reunited with his wife, who has been living in Texas. The wife, who asked to be identified by her first initial of D out of concern for her and her family’s safety, wiped away tears as she sat on a couch in her sister’s house early Saturday, in a Houston suburb.
The woman, a 32-year-old who was born in Iraq, met her husband while both were students at a Baghdad college. The couple have one child — a 7-year-old son who is in first grade.
Relatives crowded the living room in their pyjamas and slippers, making and receiving phone calls to and from other relatives and the refugee’s lawyers. At times, D was so emotional she had trouble speaking about her husband’s predicament.
“I’m really breaking down, because I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s not fair.”
Earlier on Friday, she had watched news coverage about Trump’s executive order. “My husband was already on the airplane,” she said. “He got to the airplane at 11 o’clock Houston time.” At that point, she grew worried about what impact the order would have on her husband, but she assumed it would not take effect immediately.
Early Saturday morning, Alshawi called his wife on her mobile phone.
“He gave his package and his passport to an airport officer, and they didn’t talk to him, they just put him in a room,” she said, recounting the conversation. “He told me that they forced him to get back to Iraq. He asked for his lawyer and to apply for an asylum case. And they told him you can’t do that, you need to go back to your country.
“They told him it’s the president’s decision,” she said.
D's brother, who listened to the call on speaker, said: “He’s very calm but he’s, like, desperate. He said, ‘They are sending me there, they are sending me there'," referring to Iraq.
