CHICAGO: Visa holders from seven majority-Muslim countries who were turned away from the United States due to President Donald Trump’s travel ban are hoping to make it through a narrow window opened by legal challenges.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco denied Trump’s effort to immediately reinstate the ban early on Sunday. For now, it remains blocked by a judge’s temporary restraining order, and federal officials have told their staffs to comply.

Advocates weren’t taking any chances, telling people who could travel to get on the earliest flights they could find after the week-old ban was blocked on Friday by US District Judge James Robart in Seattle.

“We’re telling them to get on the quickest flight ASAP,” said Rula Aoun, director of the Arab American Civil Rights League in Dearborn, Michigan. Her group sued in federal court in Detroit, challenging Trump’s executive order as unconstitutional.

Protesters sought to keep up the pressure, gathering in Denver and other US cities to demonstrate against the ban. Meanwhile, legal advocates waited at airports in case anything went wrong with new arrivals.

Renee Paradis was among 20-25 volunteer lawyers and interpreters who stationed themselves inside John F. Kennedy’s Terminal 4 in New York in case anyone needed help. They were carrying handmade signs in Arabic and Farsi “that say we’re lawyers, we’re here to help. We’re not from the government,” Paradis said.

“We’re all just waiting to see what actually happens and who manages to get through,” she said.

A Yemeni family expected to arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday from Egypt after leaving two of their four children behind. The father and two children are US citizens and the mother has an immigrant visa, but the other two children don’t have their papers yet. “They just don’t want to take a chance of waiting,” Paradis said.

Cairo airport officials say a total of 33 US-bound migrants from Yemen, Syria and Iraq have boarded flights on their way to the United States.

The officials said the 33 had not previously been turned back, but were rather migrants who are rushing to take advantage of the window offered by the court ruling. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

The State Department has advised refugee aid agencies that refugees who had been scheduled to travel before the order was signed will now be allowed into the US a State Department official said in an email obtained by The Associated Press that the government is “focusing on booking refugee travel through Feb 17”, with arrivals resuming as soon as Monday.

US officials have said up to 60,000 foreigners had their visas “provisionally revoked” to comply with Trump’s order. Confusion during the rollout of the ban initially found green card holders caught in travel limbo, until the White House on Wednesday clarified that they were not included in the ban.

Even so, green card holder Ammar Alnajjar, a 24-year-old Yemeni student at Southwest Tennessee Community College, cut short his planned three-month visit with his fiancée in Turkey, paying $1,000 to return immediately when the ban was lifted. “I got to study. I got to do some work,” said Alnajjar, who arrived at JFK on Saturday. He said he fled civil war in Yemen and moved to the US from Turkey in 2015.

Hesitant airlines

Despite the suspension of the travel ban, some airlines were slow to let aboard people from the seven countries.

A Qatar Airways spokeswoman said the airline would begin boarding travellers from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Iran and Somalia. But immigration attorney Julie Goldberg said a Qatar Airways representative told her that immigrants from the seven countries were still not allowed to fly on Saturday afternoon.

Goldberg said she was trying to arrange flights for dozens of Yemeni citizens who have immigrant visas and were stranded in Djibouti.

She said a superviser at Turkish Airlines told her that people holding immigrant and non-immigrant visas from the seven countries still were being banned unless they had a special email from the US Customs and Border Protection.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2017