A view from New York: Arab Americans work out travel plans as U.S. sorts out Trump’s ban

Reporting from New York —  For years, Waddh Mubarez has helped people get home.

Mubarez works at a popular travel agency for New York City’s Arab American community, whose members visit the cramped yellow storefront to book trips for friends and family. The requests range from months-long trips to hometowns in Yemen to once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

But the nature of Mubarez’s job has changed since the White House in January issued a controversial and hotly contested executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority nations.

A trip home, once a reason for celebration, has become a bureaucratic mess, he said.

Each day, the soft-spoken 32-year-old Yemeni-born U.S. citizen works the phones, trying to book travel for passengers stranded in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, or console clients too afraid to risk leaving the United States.

He tries to keep a healthy perspective. The situation isn’t so bad for him, after all, in his small Brooklyn office tucked next to a street-front mosque. It’s a lot worse for the clients stuck in transit.

“For us, it’s a problem for the business,” he said. “But for the passengers, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Yet it’s personal for him, too: His mother, father, and younger brother are still living in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, as the country descends into civil war. They have been waiting for a visa to visit the United States for the past seven months, he said.

“It is taking a long time, more than before,” he said with a pained smile.

They are safe “for now,” he said, “but we don’t know what will happen after that.”

Mubarez is among the tens of thousands of Arab Americans across New York who have been swept up in changes some didn’t expect or don’t fully understand during the ongoing saga of the executive order some have nicknamed the “Muslim ban.”

In bodegas, Islamic bookstores, attorneys’ offices, favorite restaurants and neighborhood mosques, many Arab American New Yorkers speak of the confusion and frustration. Rumors at times substitute for facts while community members try to sort out what to expect. Even attorneys have been left puzzled.

The executive order banned travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States. It immediately sent airports into chaos, spurred nationwide protests and was challenged in court by multiple civil rights organizations and states attorneys general. A federal judge in Seattle issued a stay on the order, which was upheld by a federal appeals court in San Francisco.

In response to the court decision, Trump said he plans to release a new executive order that will thoroughly vet travelers while addressing safety concerns.

While American green card holders are typically free to reenter the country from travel overseas, many were detained on entry in the early days of the executive order, when border officials still were unsure how to interpret the regulations. To be safe, some attorneys have advised their clients with green cards to stay in the United States.

“Everybody who has a green card now, we tell them, nothing is clear, so don’t make any travel plans right now,” said Houria Hethat, 46, an office manager for a Brooklyn attorney who serves the Arab American community. “We just want things to be clear.”

For Mubarez, the uncertainty shows up in the form of interminable delays for travelers awaiting visas to enter the United States, as embassies struggle with a backlog of applicants dating to before the travel ban.

Many Yemeni travelers end up in Djibouti, a small country on the Horn of Africa across a strait from Yemen, where they can visit an American embassy for visa processing. The American consulate in Yemen has been shuttered since 2015.

Summer Nasser, 22, a Yemeni American translator and immigration consultant, said it took nine months for her husband, who is Yemeni, to obtain a visa allowing him to join her stateside six months ago.

She helps host workshops so community members can better understand their rights and fields phone calls from visa holders concerned about whether they should travel either to or from the United States.

“I’ve told them that everything is fine, that the ban is temporarily frozen,” she said. “But they are concerned because they might wake up tomorrow and there will be another immigration order.”

In the meantime, she tells them, “Just relax. We have the courts on our side.”

Protests against Trump’s executive order and the court decisions have helped buoy spirits, Nasser said.

Hundreds of Yemeni-owned bodegas and grocery stores in New York temporarily closed this month to protest the order, and thousands of supporters attended a rally in Brooklyn.

“We made history within the community,” she said. “Usually bodega owners wouldn’t close for anything, not even a religious holiday. To actually close, that’s serious.”

Elyas Mubarez, 20, who works with his brother Waddh at the travel agency, said a lot of people realize the ban is “not right.” It matters to all kinds of people, including Arab Americans who don’t hail from the countries covered in the order.

In their Brooklyn grocery store and butcher shop, Egyptians Hamed Nabawy and Mohamed Naselnas had their share of frustrations with the order. Nabawy said that his sister struggled to get a visa to visit the U.S. and that he had heard of people being forced off flights leaving Cairo for New York.

Nabawy, who has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, said the Trump administration reminded him of the ill-fated presidency of Mohamed Morsi. Morsi was the first Egyptian president to be freely elected after decades of one-party rule, but he was ousted in 2013 after about a year in office.

Like Morsi, Nabawy said, Trump was trying to do too much too soon, and not being careful in the process.

“Even if he has good intentions, he doesn’t have the experience to make it fact,” he said. “The way he’s started is going to make him fail.”

Trump was fighting a losing battle in a country full of immigrants, by “swimming against the current,” he said.

At the travel agency, Waddh Mubarez sees business boom each week after midday Friday prayers as concerned clients come in, asking for help.

When business dies down, he thinks about his family in Sana’s and people’s concerns about traveling.

“It is a sad moment,” he said quietly.

Hansen is a special correspondent.

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