Courts used to beat US govt's Syria travel ban

Mohammed Hafar paced around the airport terminal - first to the monitor to check flight arrivals, then to the gift shop and lastly to the doors where international passengers were exiting.

At last, out came Jana Hafar, his tall, slender, dark-haired teen daughter who had been forced by President Donald Trump's travel ban to stay behind in Syria for months while her father, his wife and 10-year-old son Karim started rebuilding their lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with no clear idea of when the family would be together again.

That she landed at Kennedy Airport on a recent December day is testament to her father's determination to keep his promise that they would be reunited and his willingness to go as far as suing the government in federal court. Advocates say the process for obtaining a travel ban waiver is still shrouded in unpredictability, which causes delays for thousands of American citizens waiting for loved ones.

"She is not a risk to national security or public safety. And for some reason that took them over a year and they didn't to it until she was a party to litigation," said Curtis Morrison, the Los Angeles-based attorney who has filed several federal lawsuits, including Hafar's, against the administration on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs from countries affected by the travel ban.

Many of those he has represented have received visas.

But he said those cases represent only a fraction of the people in need and that the decision to grant those visas are unfair to thousands of other immigrants who cannot sue or do not know how to take their frustrations to court.

The third version of the administration's ban took effect in December 2017, keeping citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea, and government representatives from Venezuela, from travelling or immigrating to the United States.

The Supreme Court upheld the ban in June 2018, in part because of the promised waiver system that would allow people to come despite the ban if certain criteria were met.

The government says 28,100 immigrant visa applications were filed by people seeking waivers to move to the US between December 2017 and 31 October 2019.

Of those, 11,325 have been deemed qualified for waivers and 16,775 have not.

It was unclear how many of those who have been deemed qualified have actually received visas and how quickly. At the beginning of 2019, waivers were being issued in a trickle, with only 2,673 granted for both immigrant and non-immigrant visas between December 2017 and January 2019 according to State Department figures.

In an emailed statement, the State Department said changes made in late June have "significantly" increased the number handed out monthly, and they "believe this is representative of the new normal; and that applicants who qualify for a waiver will likely be issued their visa much sooner than possible before the changes."

But while some overall applications for immigrant and non-immigrant visas submitted in recent months are seeing faster processing and approval times, earlier cases are still languishing, with no transparency from the government, said Mahsa Khanbabai, an immigration lawyer in North Easton, Massachusetts.

"We're talking about a legal process to immigrate to the United States and barriers being set up in all different angles," Khanbabai said. "They're hoping people will give up, that they will be just disallusioned with the process, that they'll not have the capacity to try to find and attorney, to pay an attorney, that people will just feel overwhelmed with these delays and just say 'forget it, I'll just go somewhere else.'"

Hafar, a Syria native and naturalized American citizen since 1996, had been living in Syria with his family when civil war started. He came back to the US in 2012, assuming he could transfer citizenship to his children and apply separately for his wife to receive a green card making her a permanent legal resident.

His wife got the card in early 2017, but paperwork problems got in the way of the children's transfers, requiring him to submit immigrant petitions for them. He was told in 2018 that his son would get his visa, but there was no word on when Jana would.

"The first question I had was why did them do this to me?" Jana said last week in the family's New Jersey apartment, where she never strayed far from her mother. "You know, because, I did nothing wrong at all."

Her brother Karim came to the US in May, leaving Jana behind in Damascus with her cancer-stricken grandfather and her grandmother, who spent most of her time looking after him.

Hafar was determined. He said to Jana, "Remember this, what I'm going to tell you. I will do whatever necessary to bring you over."

After filing the lawsuit in August, Jana's petition got moving in October, and she was soon given the go-ahead to come to the US. The official word came just days after she turned 15 and spent a birthday without her parents and brother.

Now settling into her new life in suburban New Jersey, Jana plans to start school in the new year.

"Here I have a beautiful, beautiful future in the world," she said.

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