Sunday, January 29, 2017

Uphill battle

I wrote last weekend how one of the small pieces of encouragement I found under the new administration was that within three days of me posting about sponsoring an Afghani refugee family with a group of friends, we had raised all the money and supplies we needed to support them in their transition to America. They were scheduled to arrive this upcoming Wednesday, February 1, when we would meet them at the airport with a warm meal and welcome them to their new home. Friday night we found out that the president signed an executive order banning all refugees from entering the country for 120 days, and cutting the number of refugees being accepted this year from 110,000 to 50,000, even though more than 50,000 have already been vetted - including our family. Best case scenario is that they still get in after spending an additional and unnecessary four months in a refugee camp. Worst case is they don't make the cut anymore. And that's to say nothing of all the families from the seven countries that are banned entirely.

I spent about two hours sobbing in bed yesterday morning. I know this isn't the most upsetting thing about the executive order, but I kept thinking how I had found this one tiny way to help one individual family in the face of so much awfulness, and now even that was gone. And then thinking that the despair and helplessness I was feeling could only be a tiny drop in the bucket of how the family was feeling. They had been five days away from starting a new life in safety, after years and years of waiting in refugee camps and being vetted and vetted and vetted again. I can't even wrap my head around how that would feel.

Ben eventually got me out of bed, and as we were trying to figure out what to do, a friend told us that a protest was happening at SFO airport in a few hours. I figured doing something was better than continuing to cry at home, and that it might feel good to turn some of my anger into yelling. We pulled two big pieces of cardboard from the dumpster outside our apartment building, wrote "banning refugees does not make us safer" on them in marker, met up with some friends who had just done the same, and then headed over to SFO. We got there shortly after the protest was scheduled to start at 3 and there were already a couple hundred people there - within about an hour there were close to a thousand, and the road to the terminal was shut down as we filled the space. We eventually moved inside and took over the arrivals level of the international terminal, since that's where the Department of Homeland Security is.

As with the Women's March last week, being with a big group of people all committed to the same values was a comforting experience during a profoundly discomforting time. I was particularly heartened by the number of signs expressing Jewish-Muslim solidarity, since so often that divide is exploited to try and prevent two groups who are both oppressed by Christian hegemony from coming together as one. I was also heartened by the number of people showing up with tons of water bottles and food to distribute throughout the crowd, especially as the evening wore on and it became clear we were going to be there a long time. There were lots of chants and songs, but my favorite was "Move Trump, get out the way. Get out the way, Trump, get out the way" (reference, in case you need it). Both because it was fun to yell from a pettiness perspective, but also because it's how this whole week is making me feel - he will get out of the way, or we the people will push him out.

The best moment of the night was when word came through that a federal judge had issued a temporary stay on the executive order. The crowd erupted into a joyous mass of screaming, clapping, jumping, and overall jubilation. I don't know if this was a pure coincidence or if the noise triggered it (either from the crowd or from my own yelling), but at that moment the baby started kicking like crazy. I felt like I was doing something as a parent for the first time - trying to make a better world for my kid to live in.

We'd later find out that the judge's stay only applies to people who were already traveling when the order was issued, and that it would still take many hours - and in some cases over a day - for Customs and Border Protection to follow the stay and release people being detained, or even let them have access to a lawyer (even as of today, CBP is still disobeying the order in at least one airport). We ended up staying until 9pm, at which point my pregnant self was not hard core enough to commit to spending the night like many of the protestors did. An even bigger crowd reassembled today, though, since detainees were still being held as late as this afternoon, and on the news there are dozens of similar protests happening at airports and public spaces across the country. So, while this administration is clearly going to make it harder to find even small glimmers of hope than I thought, there are plenty of Americans willing to come together and fight for those glimmers. It's a small comfort to the Afghani family now indefinitely stuck in a refugee camp after being promised safety, and the thousands of other families in the same position, but hopefully it's the start of moving the administration out of the way and making America a country that is worthy of those families once again.

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