After months of work, the house on Second Street in Allentown was ready Saturday for Ghassan Assali’s two brothers and their families.
Assali and his wife, Sarmad, remodeled it and furnished it and were prepared to hand over the keys to the Syrian relatives upon their long-awaited arrival Saturday morning in Philadelphia.
But on his way to Philadelphia International Airport, Assali received a phone call from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official. Don’t bother coming, the official told him. Your relatives have been sent back.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday barring non-American citizens from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen from entering the country for 90 days. The Assalis’ six relatives were briefly detained in Philadelphia before getting put on a flight back to Doha, Qatar.
Trump said the ban was needed to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists.” A federal judge on Saturday night issued an emergency stay that temporarily allows people who landed in the United States with a valid visa to remain.
By then, the Assalis’ relatives were already gone.
According to Sarah Assali, Ghassan and Sarmad’s daughter, their six Syrian relatives — the youngest is 17 and the oldest is 61 — are Christians from Damascus. They are immigrants, not refugees, she said, with approved visas and paperwork for green cards.
The families were given a choice, Sarah Assali said: Leave today or risk losing your visas entirely.
“They felt afraid, so they turned around,” Sarah said Saturday afternoon. “Now they’re on an 18-hour flight right back to Doha.”
Countless other refugees, their families and aid workers scrambled Saturday as travelers from the predominantly Muslim countries were turned back on arrival at U.S. airports. Others were blocked from boarding flights to the United States.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-15th District, said he called the White House on Saturday after speaking to the Assalis, who live in Allentown.
“It appears this order has been rushed through without full consideration of the many nuances of immigration policy that can be life or death for vulnerable people across the world,” said Dent, who represents much of the Lehigh Valley.
“This is not an acceptable situation, and I certainly urge the administration to halt enforcement of this order until a more deliberate policy can be instated,” he added. “I think that’s really the issue right now.”
The president’s order bars all refugees from entering the United states for four months and indefinitely bars Syrian refugees, 12,000 of which resettled in the United States last year after fleeing war, political oppression, hunger and religious prejudice.
The visa process for the Assalis’ relatives started in 2003 and they were approved in December, Sarah Assali said. But the families decided to spend one last Christmas in Damascus with relatives who would not be joining them in the United States.
Damascus has not experienced the worst of of the ongoing war, but life has not been easy for the families, Sarmad Assali said. They recently had to bathe with bottled water after the city’s water supply was allegedly contaminated.
“It keeps getting harder and harder to live there,” she said. “The economy is shot, no one is buying anything, and people keep fleeing.”
In America, her relatives hoped to get jobs and send their children to college, just as Ghassan and Sarmad did. Sarah is a third-year medical student in Ohio, and Joseph Assali is a third-year undergraduate in Philadelphia. Both graduated from Parkland High School.
The Assalis are trying to start a new life here like generations of immigrants before them, Sarah Assali said.
“This ban is completely unethical, completely un-American and completely unconstitutional,” she added.
Trump’s order singled out Syrians for the most aggressive ban, ordering that anyone from that country, including those fleeing civil war, are indefinitely blocked from coming to the United States.
After signing the documents, Trump said: “It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over.”
Dent said Saturday that the refugee vetting process that the country has been using is “actually fairly thorough” and “fairly robust.”
“We can make it better and we should make it better, but I’m concerned this order needs to be more fully considered,” he said.
“We have already called the White House trying to get them to revisit this issue,” Dent added. “On an executive order like this, I hope the Justice Department was consulted, as with the State Department, as well as Homeland Security and Defense.”
The Department of Homeland Security and White House officials were not available for comment Saturday afternoon.
U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-11th District, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, applauded Trump’s order Saturday.
“I am in full support of President Trump’s actions, which I believe are only prudent, while we work on a system that allows us to verify the identity and background of applicants,” he said in a statement Saturday.
A federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press the order has an exemption for foreigners whose entry is in the U.S. national interest. It was not immediately clear how that exemption might be applied.
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat, tweeted Saturday evening that his office has contacted Homeland Security “to get to the bottom of the situation,” regarding the Assalis.
The Assalis said their relatives were relieved just to make their first flight out of Beirut, where heavy snow fell this weekend. They never expected that the Trump executive order would apply to them.
Sarmad had planned a big dinner and celebration Saturday night. Instead, they waited for word from Qatar — and wondered what will happen next.
“Mr. President, what do I do now?” Sarmad asked. “What should I do? I have no idea.”
awagaman@mcall.com
Twitter @andrewwagaman
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The Associated Press contributed to this story.
