The White House implemented its ban on travel to the United States from 12 Middle Eastern and African countries, including Afghanistan, effective June 9. However, the Afghan refugee community in Northeast Ohio said the move betrays them and their service to American troops during the war in Afghanistan.
There are approximately 5,000 Afghan refugees in Northeast Ohio, including 2,300 in Cleveland.
One member of that community is Lida Ahmadi, who works as community care lead for Asia Services in Action in Akron. She also was a translator during the war, working at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. She was also on one of the last flights out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over.
While she got out of the country before the U.S. left, an estimated tens of thousands of other Afghan translators, soldiers, lawyers and judges who worked with the U.S. military remain in Afghanistan.
The travel ban not only impacts individuals left behind, but instances where families have been split up, she said. For example, an Afghan soldier may have made it to the U.S., but had to leave their family in Afghanistan for what they thought was just a temporary period, she said.
鈥淛ust imagine, they have no hope of their kids or the wives anymore," she told said. "I have seen people who are very hopeless and they're in the state of mind where they don't want to even live their life anymore.鈥�
In the meantime, Afghan refugees who are in the U.S. on temporary asylum have been receiving of termination of their temporary protected status since April, causing fear among the refugee community she said.
"When I saw those emails, to be honest, it broke my heart," she said. "The fear that I saw on people's face, the rush that they came to my office, their face was telling me, save me. But I cannot do anything."
The Trump Administration argued in its June 4 proclamation establishing the travel ban for Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen that this was necessary to protect the country against "foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats."
But Ahmadi was not buying the argument.
"This country can do anything," she said. "They can stop people who are really against them, not just innocent people who are suffering in the country where they are not safe. It doesn't even make sense to me. You got the power. You should keep your promise."
