US exempts Yemen mother from visa ban to see dying son

Dec 18, 2018

After a tearful televised plea from the boy's father, the US embassy in Cairo issued a visa for Swileh, who has been staying in Egypt as she tries to fly to the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights group that assisted the family.

A mother from Yemen was granted a visa Tuesday to see her dying toddler after US officials issued a waiver from its ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority countries, supporters said.

Two-year-old Abdullah Hassan, a US citizen like his father, suffers from a rare genetic brain condition and is on life support in a hospital in Oakland, California.

His mother, Shaima Swileh, was unable to join him due to President Donald Trump's order barring most citizens from six countries including Yemen.

After a tearful televised plea from the boy's father, the US embassy in Cairo issued a visa for Swileh, who has been staying in Egypt as she tries to fly to the United States, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights group that assisted the family.

"We are trying to get her on the soonest flight over," said a member of the group's Sacramento chapter, who asked not to be quoted by name.

Abdullah's grandfather earlier said that Swileh was crying every day as she tried to reunite with her son, who the family plans to take off life support after doctors concluded that his case is terminal.

"We need her to see her son one last time. To hold him for at least a minute. She's not going to see him forever," the grandfather, Fawzi Hassan, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Until the media attention, the family said it kept receiving automated responses from US authorities that their case was being processed.

Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat who represents Oakland, took up the case and said it showed how Trump's travel ban was "inhumane and un-American."

"As a member of Congress, and a mother myself, the cruelty of barring a mother from reuniting with a sick child takes my breath away," she tweeted late Monday.

Trump vowed during the 2016 campaign to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, despite constitutional protections of freedom of religion, after a mass shooting in California by a couple of Pakistani descent.

In an executive order that triggered chaos before court challenges and revisions, Trump blocked new visas to nearly all citizens of five Muslim-majority countries -- Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen -- as well as North Korea.

A divided Supreme Court in June upheld the ban, which it said was within the president's powers.




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