As judges deliberated President Trump’s travel ban, four children from the Syrian city of Aleppo were slipping and sliding across the floor of an airport in Turkey as the clock to their new life counted down.
After years in a temporary apartment, 9-year-old Mohamed Tawouz imagined having his own room one day. His 6-year-old brother, Malik, just wanted a new teddy bear.
Trump’s executive order had torpedoed their dreams and left them with few options.
“That last week felt like a year to us. But now I’m just so happy,” sister Wajeeha, 11, said with a grin late Tuesday before their flight. “I haven’t done this before. Will it be scary on the plane?”
With legal challenges to Trump’s ban on refugees and on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries ongoing, families were waiting at airports across the Middle East, with flights rebooked and hopes for a new life rekindled.
The Tawouz family’s bags were already packed Jan. 27 when they learned that Trump’s executive order had put a Feb. 1 flight to Buffalo out of reach. On Tuesday night at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, those same $3 black bags were full again, crammed with baby clothes and jars of fiery red peppers from the city they had fled four years earlier.
All week, Wajeeha had struggled to hold back tears at any mention of the home they had been promised in New York. Now she was wide-eyed at the prospect of her first plane journey and brimming with confidence at the speed with which she would learn English.
“I’ll learn it from YouTube and the people in the streets,” she said in Arabic with a laugh. Neither she nor her siblings would sleep Tuesday night as they waited for their flight.
But not everyone in the family was so jubilant. Watching his children zoom about, Majid Tawouz felt an anxiety he could not shake. He knew that a U.S. court could rule on his family’s fate before they landed in Upstate New York. He also knew there were more challenges ahead.
The questions of friends back home still troubled him: Would they face suspicion in America? What about racism? And after everything they had read, would his family ever really feel accepted?
More pressing still were worries about the flight. “It’s a first for all of us. I’m going to have to film the takeoff,” Tawouz said.
Syria’s almost six-year-old war has claimed half a million lives and spurred the largest refugee crisis since World War II. With millions of Syrians now spread across Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond, the Trump administration has said the order is a matter of national security.
After almost two years of vetting by international and government agencies, the Syrian families gathered at the Istanbul airport were aghast at the idea they could be considered a security risk.
One Kurdish man had fled the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. “I hate those people,” he said of the militants. “I’d even accept the devil coming to retake my city. I spent years getting my house ready there. They took everything from me.”
Such thoughts were far from the children’s minds. Thinking ahead to New York, Wajeeha said she wanted to become a pediatrician. Malik was intrigued by the role of the supermarket cashier. “I could pass products through the bar-code reader and listen to that beep,” he said.
And then it was time to go.
Leaning across the check-in counter, an attendant asked Tawouz if he understood that the family had to relinquish their bags, and the life they contained, until they landed in New York on Wednesday. Placing his hand on the pile, he paused briefly and then, after days of frowning, gently smiled.
“We’re ready,” he said.
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