CHICAGO — Visa holders from seven majority-Muslim countries affected by President Donald Trump’s travel ban hurried to board U.S.-bound flights Saturday, fearing they might have only a slim window through which to enter the country after a federal judge temporarily blocked the ban.
Those who could travel immediately were being urged to do so because of uncertainty over whether the Justice Department would be granted an emergency freeze of the order issued Friday by U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle. The government on Saturday suspended enforcement of the week-old ban as it scurried to appeal Robart’s order, which President Trump harshly criticized Saturday on Twitter.
Rula Aoun, director of the Arab American Civil Rights League in Dearborn, Michigan, said her group is advising people to hurry.
“We’re telling them to get on the quickest flight ASAP,” said Aoun, whose group filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Detroit asking a judge to declare Trump’s immigration order unconstitutional.
Aoun said some people have had to make hard choices, including a Yemeni family expected to arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday from Egypt without two of their children. The father and two of the children are U.S. citizens, the mother has an immigrant visa, but the other two children did not yet have theirs and were left behind with relatives.
“They just don’t want to take a chance of waiting,” she said.
U.S. officials have said up to 60,000 foreigners had their visas “provisionally revoked” to comply with Trump’s order. Confusion during the rollout of the ban initially found green card holders caught in travel limbo, until the White House on Wednesday clarified that they would be allowed to enter and leave the U.S as they pleased.
Even so, green card holder Ammar Alnajjar, a 24-year-old Yemeni student at Southwest Tennessee Community College, cut short a planned three-month visit to his fiancee in Turkey, paying $1,000 to return immediately when the ban was lifted.
“I got to study. I got to do some work,” said Alnajjar, who arrived at JFK on Saturday. He said he fled civil war in Yemen and moved to the U.S. from Turkey in 2015. “I’m Muslim. I’m proud of it. Islam means peace.”
Judge Robart, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, declared in his ruling that “there’s no support” for the administration’s argument that “we have to protect the U.S. from individuals” from the affected countries, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Libya.
The judge also barred the administration from enforcing its limits on accepting refugees. The State Department said on Saturday that refugees, including Syrians, might begin arriving as early as Monday. Syrians had faced an indefinite ban under the executive order.
In an early-morning Twitter post from his waterfront Florida resort, where he is spending the first getaway weekend of his presidency, President Trump wrote, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”
Although the government suspended enforcement of the travel ban while it sought an emergency stay of Robart’s order, some airlines reportedly still weren’t letting some people from the seven countries board their planes, at least initially.
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