An Iranian Prospect-Lefferts Gardens resident is stranded overseas by President Trump’s travel ban.
Saira Rafiee, a doctoral student at the City University of New York living here on a student visa, was returning from visiting her family in Iran on Friday when Trump signed his executive order banning Iranians and citizens of six other Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., she wrote on Facebook.
She says she wasn’t allowed to board a plane back to the States in Abu Dhabi, and had to stay there for almost 18 hours with 11 others before flying back to Tehran, and is now afraid she may never make it back to New York to complete her studies.
“I have no clue whether I would ever be able to go back to the school I like so much, or to see my dear friends there,” Rafiee wrote.
Raifee noted that the experience must be far more terrifying for those “fleeing war and disastrous situations” in their home countries, and slammed the ban as a racist policy that will do little to stop terrorism.
“The media has published enough statistics during the past few days to show how irrelevant this order is to the fight against terrorism,” she wrote. “It is time to call things by their true names; this is Islamophobia, racism, fascism.”
Rafiee lives in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, according to the Borough President, who held a press conference about her situation outside the federal courthouse on Monday — the first day of the semester — alongside her cousin and City University of New York students and faculty.
Pupils and professors alike said they were distraught to hear what had happened to one of their own, and vowed fight the ban so she can return.
“It really hurt me to read her message,” said Hercules Reid, the student government president at the university’s College of Technology. “How can you stand here and hear that statement and not feel brokenhearted? Hardworking and law abiding people like Ms. Rafiee deserve better than this.”
A Brooklyn federal judge on Saturday temporarily barred the Feds from deporting valid visa holders already en route to America when Trump’s order went into effect, but it doesn’t help those who can’t get on planes in the first place.
