- The Biden government has said it will offer visas to people who are denied entry because of Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’.
- But the administration does not grant access to those who have been granted ‘diversity visas’.
- Thousands of such visas are issued annually to members of under-represented groups.
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The president’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries was ‘morally wrong’, in the words of President Joe Biden. But the new government is denying the entry of thousands of people affected by it.
Biden withdrew shortly after the adoption of the so-called ‘Muslim ban’. And this week, his government announced that a majority of those who were denied access to the U.S. could re-apply for a visa.
But the White House has left out one significant group: thousands of people selected to receive ‘diversity visas’ – meant, as the name implies, to encourage the migration of under-represented people – only to have it passed by an executive order from Donald Trump take away. , who subsequently tried to eliminate the diversity program altogether.
People like Anwar al Saeedi, a Yemeni man who expected to move to the US with his wife and two young children in 2017.
“It was a big dream for me to be able to move my children to America to live in a respected country that respects human rights and where it is possible to live in safety,” he told NPR earlier this year. Instead, he lives in the African nation of Djibouti, where he traveled with his family and spent thousands of dollars interviewing for his visa (the US embassy in Yemen was closed amid years of war).
“This is discouraging and disappointing,” Abed Ayoub, director of legal and policy at the U.S. Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told Insider. The committee represents people like Anwar who have devised plans for a new life, only to deny it.
“These individuals are now in a worse position,” Ayoub said, “because this government, whether it is Biden or Trump, has made a promise to them and acted on it.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups challenging Trump’s travel ban, called the new government’s decision a disgrace.
“President Biden just dusted off Trump’s ‘CLOSED’ sign and locked the door behind him,” ACLU lawyer Manar Waheed said in a statement. “This decision threatens to forever prevent thousands of black and brown immigrants who meet all the legal requirements to immigrate to the United States from doing so, which will continue the consequences of the discriminatory ban.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it excluded visa recipients from diversity from the reversal of the Muslim ban.
But one reason may be the law: the U.S. State Department is limited to issuing 55,000 diversity visas a year, with a specific number available for different parts of the world. According to Reuters, Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said Monday that the law authorizing the program also requires applicants to demonstrate their qualifications within the same fiscal year in which they were elected.
Ayoub thinks this is something of a cop-out. His group urged the government to circumvent any legal issue by granting ‘humanitarian parole’ to those still injured by the travel ban. The said parole could, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, be issued to anyone “who is otherwise temporarily unavailable in the United States for an emergency.”
From there, a more permanent solution can be worked on. Ayoub said the goal now is legislation that allows those on humanitarian conditional release to apply for asylum or any other legal status that grants a right of residence when they are here.
“But we need the government and Congress to be on the same page,” he said. “If you call the Muslim ban discriminatory, and you call it a stain, you must fully correct what has been done.”
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