When it began to dawn on Marjan Vayghan that her uncle Ali had been detained by customs enforcement at the Los Angeles International Airport, she hadn’t even heard about President Trump’s Muslim ban. On the evening of January 27, the same day Trump signed the executive order, Ali Vayeghan (he and his niece spell their names differently), an Iranian national with an American green card, was scheduled to arrive at LAX on a 7 p.m. flight. It wasn’t until 2 a.m. that a customs official confirmed to Marjan’s distraught family what they already suspected: that Ali was being held prisoner at the airport.
Marjan didn’t get any sleep until seven that morning. Before she crawled into bed, she put up a post on Facebook, describing to her friends what had happened to her uncle.
When she woke up at noon and checked her newsfeed, Marjan told me, “my friends had just gone crazy.” Her post had caught fire. Her friends were livid about the travel ban, which Marjan now learned was what was behind her uncle’s predicament. Her father called and told her that all her friends were there at the airport already. “The angry feminist friends from your art shows who don’t wear makeup are hugging your mom,” he told her. A few hours later, while she was on her way to LAX, her father called again. “It’s not just your friends anymore,” he said. By now, protesters had begun to arrive at the airport to show their solidarity with the detained travelers and their opposition to the executive order. By the time Marjan left LAX late that night, the crowd had grown to hundreds. By the following day, it would be thousands.
After 20 hours in detention, with no provision of food or sleeping accommodations, during which time Customs and Border Protection tried to get him to sign away his residency (he refused), Ali was put on a plane to Dubai, where he was expected to connect to a flight back to Tehran, and to somehow get through customs in both countries with “REVOKED” written across his visa with a red sharpie.
Peter Bibring, an ACLU attorney, had rushed to file a request for an injunction when he heard about Ali’s deportation order. But by the time the court received it, there was no time for a ruling before Ali’s flight took off. The plane left Los Angeles to Dubai with Ali on it.
On the afternoon of February 2, Ali Vayeghan, apparently the first person to be deported out of LAX under Trump’s executive order, became the first person to be brought back into the country under a court ruling that rejected the legal and constitutional basis of Trump’s ban. The ACLU hadn’t been able to prevent Ali’s removal from the United States, but it had managed to secure his return.
Ali stepped off the plane and into the embrace of his niece. The mayor was there to shake his hand. So was a giant, frenzied scrum of reporters (myself among them), holding their cameras and their phones aloft to get even a passing shot of the family’s reunion. Protesters were there, too, holding up signs welcoming Ali Vayeghan to the United States of America.
“He is now a lawful permanent resident of the United States,” Bibring told me. “We’re hopeful that the government will respect that.”
I bet there are many long-term residents who have lost all connections to their countries of origin. Imagine crossing into Canada or something, then coming back and being deported to a country you know little of, losing a lot of your property and so forth.
That’s one of the more clear cut reasons why the EO was fundamentally evil.
“On Sunday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee issued an order instructing authorities to transport Vayeghan from Dubai to the U.S. — an infrequently used but not unprecedented legal remedy — and admit him under the terms of his visa, which is set to expire in February, The Times reported.”
Visa was set to expire in February (no mention of the date), weird how i am not allowed to fly abroad if my passport does not have 6 months of validity left. I am Canadian.
I used to cross the border almost daily when I lived in northern Vermont. I stayed at my Canadian girlfriend’s house and worked back in the US. And before that, travelled back and forth for decades. The Canadians were always courteous and friendly, with none of the hostility and sociopathy of the US guards.
That changed after 9-11 when they got more like out side. While still not as bad as the sadists who work as police and federal storm troopers in the US, and often in the military. the good old days of Canadian friendliness are gone, and that started with your right wing Reagan clone PM Harper.
1. Passports and visas are different things.
Vayeghan is a permanent resident of the US — a “Green Card” holder. His visa is based upon that status. Green Cards are issued for ten-year periods and are renewable. In ordinary circumstances, renewal is mostly a formality.
Hope this helps.
Maybe if he’d had a line of tacky shoes and jewelry ..things would have turned out better for him?
“that a customs official confirmed to Marjan’s distraught family what they already suspected: that Ali was being held prisoner at the airport.”
Held prisoner? You mean he was sent to prison? Is that what that custom official confirmed? No. Those are your own words deceptively put into someone else’s mouth. That’s partisan hecking, not journalism.
Where do you, bunch, come from?
Detained against one’s will is called being a prisoner. While your ignorant English is excusable, it continues with seemingly no attempt at improvement. Are you Trump?
Exactly. When armed agents of the state take you and you are not free to leave, that is called imprisonment. If a non-state actor does it, it is almost always a “false imprisonment.”
Well it is a question of technical vs. common usage of the word imprisonment:
Internal citation [1] is to the dictionary.
Also “imprisonment” is commonly understood as a “sentence” imposed by law, as opposed to unlawful imprisonment, unlawful detention, unlawful custody or false imprisonment.
So both understandings/meanings are correct.
When I was 14, I angrily attempted to correct my grandfather, who was a greek and latin scholar, when he said he was arrested by a traffic cop.
Certain he had not been arrested, I asked incredulously, “You went to jail?!”
He said, “no. I was pulled over and given a citation.”
I said, “well you weren’t arrested then, were you?,” very proud of my critical acumen.
He corrected me, and my father confirmed, “To arrest means to hinder movement.”
Alas, it was a good lesson for me about the objective value of words.
Unfortunately common english has suffered major disintegration during the Television era. On one hand most people have come to believe that meaning is relative for most words, based on usage. Synonymization (the popular replacement of the dictionary with the thesaurus) has rendered the nuance of many words almost entirely mute. On the other, many words that would otherwise have rich and diverse meaning are reduced to their official meanings, lending their utility to authoritarian inclinations, such as Ms. Imterfilth above.
The most annoying examples are ‘retard,’ and ‘discriminate.’ The fact that ‘terrific’ has come to mean good, is the ultimate Orwellian reversal, based wholly on its adoption as a popularly ironic ejaculation sometime in the ’50s or 60’s.
The overall effect is a flattening of the mental landscape. And to that, I can only offer one word, which has of late been used to replace ‘shameless’ and ‘despicable’ and to, therefore, lose much its former meaning: sad.
The semantics police is here, folks. What next, “it’s not a Muslim ban!”? Good stuff.
It’s amazing how you can’t see the difference between objecting to the use of “imprisoned” simply b/c the individual wasn’t actually in prison and objecting to calling the EO a Muslim Ban b/c 85 percent of Muslims are unaffected by it and no priority is given to non-Muslims.
The former is semantic garbage; the latter is objecting to a misstatement of fact.
Both are semantic deflection from the actual issues.
He was not imprisoned, just detained as if he were a criminal suspect.
It’s not a Muslim ban, just a blanket nationality-based ban.
As if that makes it morally better.