A Syrian refugee living in the US, Mohammed al-Refai, celebrates receiving his green card but is unable to visit his family in Jordan due to a travel ban imposed by Donald Trump.
When Syria 's dictatorship fell in early December, a celebration broke out nearly 6,000 miles away in Toledo, Ohio. At the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket, families danced and sang to Syria n music. Women ululated, and men wrapped themselves in the flag of their home country.
People leaned on their car horns, expressing their joy at the end of a regime that relied on brutality and terror as a means of governing Syria for more than half a century and waged a civil war that forced millions of people to become refugees. At the time, a 22-year-old named Mohammed al-Refai had just arrived in the city of 265,000. His situation was unusual. After his family fled Syria across the border to Jordan, Mohammed got a visa to come to the United States. His parents and siblings did not. Nobody could explain why; the State Department usually keeps families together. He lived with some American roommates just out of college who took him under their wing and called him Moh. He began to learn English and got a job at a halal butcher shop. When I first met him, some of the few English words he knew were'chicken legs, chicken breast, goat, steak, lamb.' Mohammed dreamed of visiting his family in Jordan, but after Donald Trump was first elected president, leaving the country seemed like a bad idea. Trump had run on a platform of stopping Muslims from coming to the US. Mohammed was afraid that if he went to Jordan, he might not be allowed to return. 'I need they be safe and close to me, my family, but I can't do anything,' he told me just before Trump's first inauguration in 2017. 'I feel bad for they not with me.' 'I have my green card!' Mohammed said. The roommates threw him a party with a green cake. When he called his parents in Jordan to share the good news, they cried and shouted. 'Come right now, visit us!' his mother said. But Trump had just banned travel from several Muslim majority countries, and so Mohammed sadly told them he wouldn't feel safe visiting until he had a US passpor
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