Suha Abushamma just wanted to go to work.
Minutes before the temporary stay on such deportations was handed down, that Sudanese passport was all it took to expel her from the country.
On Saturday evening, Abushamma was forced to make a choice by Customs and Border Protection agents: She could leave the country voluntarily and withdraw her visa — or she could be forcibly deported, which would have prevented her from coming back to the United States for at least five years. The latter also would have resulted in a permanent black mark on her immigration record.
“I’m only in this country to be a doctor, to work and to help people — that’s it,” she said. “There’s no other reason.”
We call ourselves free. We call ourselves the “home of the brave.” And then we wear our fear right on our sleeves, we smear it all over our faces, and we renounce any possible claim at freedom, by pulling cowardly and small-minded idiocy like this.
Abushamma had left the U.S. Monday to visit family in Saudi Arabia and then travel to Sudan. Friends alerted her on Wednesday about the possibility that Trump would sign an executive order that could make it difficult for her to return. Though she had planned to be out of the country for two more weeks, she moved quickly to change her plans, obtain a new visa and come back to the U.S. early.
“She picked up her passport from the U.S. embassy, changed her flight and came as quickly as she could but she wasn’t able to make the stroke of the pen,” said her friend, Faris El-Khider, who is a gastroenterology fellow at the Cleveland Clinic and is from Sudan. “She was basically racing against Trump.”
But she didn't make it. And, right on schedule, it seems many among the hierarchy are not displeased by this chance at othering.
She said she knew she was in trouble when a representative for Saudi Airlines approached her and told her she would have to book a flight home. Then an officer, whose name she wrote down as T. Lam, told her her choices: ”Either to withdraw my visa … so it wouldn’t leave a negative mark on my profile … or the second option was to refuse to withdraw” and be banned from the U.S. for five years. “I told them at that point I already had lawyers working on my case. I just need a few more hours … They absolutely refused. I even talked to the supervisor.”
According to FlightAware, a flight tracking website, the plane pushed back from the gate at 8:29 p.m. and took off at 8:53 p.m. The earliest reports of the judge’s stay of deportations under the executive order came at around 9 p.m.
And now that she’s gone, it isn’t likely she’ll be back.
Leopold, the immigration lawyer, said now that Abushamma has left the U.S. and “voluntarily” canceled her visa, she may not be able to return anytime soon.
“She’s not going to be able to get a visa for at least 90 days,” he said. “She’s already been removed, so I think it’s over. This is heartbreaking.”
This is our new America. Where doctors cannot go to work because our new president is throwing a xenophobic hissy fit, and where our own fear-mongering persecution is certain to foster and inflame anti-American sentiment, and so make us less safe. Just the opposite of what they claim is intended.