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 were not included in the ban.
Even so, green card holder Ammar Alnajjar, a 24-year-old Yemeni student at Southwest Tennessee Community College, cut short his planned three-month visit with 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 Saturday. He said he fled civil war in Yemen and moved to the U.S. from Turkey in 2015.
Despite the suspension of the travel ban, some airlines were slow to let aboard people from the seven countries.
Royal Jordanian Airlines, which operates direct flights from Amman to New York, Chicago and Detroit, said it would resume carrying nationals from the seven countries as long as they presented a valid U.S. visa or green card.
A Qatar Airways spokeswoman said the airline would begin boarding travelers from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Iran and Somalia. But immigration attorney Julie Goldberg said a Qatar Airways representative told her that immigrants from the seven countries were still not allowed to fly Saturday afternoon.
Goldberg said she was trying to arrange flights for dozens of Yemeni citizens who have immigrant visas and were stranded in the African nation of Djibouti.
She said a supervisor at Turkish Airlines told her that people holding immigrant and non-immigrant visas from the seven countries still were being banned unless they had a special email from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
A 12-year-old Yemeni girl whose parents and siblings are U.S. citizens living in California was finally allowed to depart after “an hour-and-half of fighting” with officials, Goldberg said. It was unclear when she would arrive.
“Her mother is on pins and needles … her father is on the plane with her,” Stacey Gartland, a San Francisco attorney who represented the girl, said in an email.
Many refugees awaited word on their fates.
Somali refugee Nadir Hassan said about 140 refugees were sent back to Dadaab refugee camp and it was unclear if or when they could travel. They had been expected to settle in the U.S. this week and had been staying at a transit center in Nairobi.
“I was hoping to start a new life in the U.S.” Hassan said. “We feel bad.”
In Tehran, the semi-official Fars news agency reported that a ban on U.S. wrestlers has been lifted following the judge’s ruling, allowing them to take part in the Freestyle World Cup later this month in the Iranian city of Kermanshah.
(Associated Press writers Cara Anna in Johannesburg; Alicia Caldwell in Washington; Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana; Robert Jablon in Los Angeles; Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan; Hamza Hendawi in Cairo; Corey Williams in Detroit and AP Radio correspondent Julie Walker and freelance writer William Mathis in New York contributed to this story.)
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