For a Yemeni in N.Y., the Agony of Who’s Been Left Behind

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/nyregion/uber-driver-yemen-wife-trump.html

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Ahmed Abdulwahab’s family has survived airstrikes and firefights. They endured daylong drives across crumbled roads and on mountain ledges so steep it felt as if gravity would surely bring them tumbling down.

Mr. Abdulwahab has crossed into Yemen territory controlled by various factions: Al Qaeda, Houthi rebels and the government, all to get his wife, mother and young daughter out of the country and into the United States. An American citizen, Mr. Abdulwahab described the weekslong journey as the most terrifying travel of his life.

But now he’s up against one final obstacle: the United States State Department.

Mr. Abdulwahab, 32, is one of hundreds of Yemeni-Americans in New York who were separated from non-U. S. citizen spouses or children following the Trump administration’s so-called travel ban, which severely restricts entry into the United States by people from seven countries, five of them Muslim-majority.

Some, like Mr. Abdulwahab’s wife, Aisha Mahyoub, 30, were approved for a visa only to have it revoked once the ban went into effect. Such an action violated the terms of the ban, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy organization based in New York. Three other Yemeni-Americans are involved in the case, which follows a similar class-action suit filed in September on behalf of more than 100 others.

(The New York Times was able to verify much of Mr. Abdulwahab’s story, though parts of his family’s travel within Yemen cannot be independently verified.)

For many Yemeni-Americans, like Mr. Abdulwahab, the cost of supporting family members in countries like Djibouti, home to the nearest American consulate, has been crippling.

In July, one Yemeni-American man committed suicide in Louisiana after succumbing to the economic strain of supporting his wife and five children after they were denied visas in Djibouti — located across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa — where rent can be six times as much as in Yemen.

Mr. Abdulwahab estimates the process of getting family members out of Yemen has already cost him $40,000. To care for his wife in Djibouti, he pays $1,500 a month for rent (such a high cost because the city caters to the foreign community), $400 for electricity, $300 for food and $200 to a woman who sometimes lends Ms. Mahyoub a hand.

In New York, he pitches in $700 for rent at his brother’s apartment, pays $500 for his own shared apartment and sends whatever money remains to relatives in Yemen, where goods have become prohibitively expensive — and children are starving as a result.

The expenses mostly exhaust the $3,500-$4,000 on average he earns per month as an Uber driver in New York City.

“I don’t know what else to do,” said Mr. Abdulwahab, his watery brown eyes framed in thin-rimmed, rectangular glasses. “I can’t bring her here, I can’t bring her back to Yemen. I just keep hoping that one day it will be over and we will be together.”

A soft-spoken man, Mr. Abdulwahab lives in a one-bedroom apartment he shares with two roommates in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Every morning, he wakes up at 3:30 a.m., showers, dresses and checks his wife’s status on the consulate website. He also checks the pictures of her on his phone — her delicate cheekbones and perfectly pink lips simultaneously at his fingertips and 7,000 miles away.

Mr. Abdulwahab was born in Yemen. Because his father is an American citizen and lived in New York, Mr. Abdulwahab moved to the United States in 2006 and was eventually granted United States citizenship. He frequently traveled between the United States and Yemen, often spending time with his sister’s friend, who would become his future wife.

The couple finally married eight years ago in a wedding hall in Al Hudaydah, Yemen’s main port city and her hometown.

When Mr. Abdulwahab left later that year to go back to the United States, he planned to complete a certificate program in Queens, get a job and then apply for his new bride to join him in America. In the meantime, Ms. Mahyoub settled in with her in-laws in Taiz, waiting patiently for years as Mr. Abdulwahab came and left, and their first daughter, Areg, was born.

But when the war between Houthi rebels and government forces broke out in early 2015, the security in Taiz deteriorated. The changes came slowly at first: A few airstrikes hit the town. Houthi rebels set up checkpoints. Then one night, airstrikes rained down, destroying apartment buildings just blocks from Ms. Mahyoub’s home.

“We were very afraid, it was like death was staring at us,” she said in a phone interview from Djibouti.

As the strikes briefly subsided, Ms. Mahyoub and her parents-in-law went to Mr. Abdulwahab’s grandfather’s house in the mountains. There Ms. Mahyoub finally called her husband for the first time in several days.

Mr. Abdulwahab panicked. They could not wait, he thought.

The application process took two years, but in 2017 Mr. Abdulwahab was notified that his mother, wife and daughter were scheduled for an interview at the American consulate in Djibouti, the final step of the visa application process. With commercial flights to Aden temporarily suspended because of the fighting, Mr. Abdulwahab booked a flight to Oman and made his way by bus and taxi to his family in Taiz, traversing Al Qaeda-controlled land and then into government territory.

By the time they all reached Djibouti, he thought the worst was behind them. His mother, Areg and his wife, now pregnant with their second child, completed their interviews in October 2017. Ms. Mahyoub was issued a document that stated that she had been approved for a visa and just needed to wait for it to be printed.

Areg and Mr. Abdulwahab’s mother, Saoud Khaled, 70, were issued their travel documents within nine days, but Ms. Mahyoub received nothing. Finally, in February 2018, she was told that her visa approval was being overturned because of the travel ban.

“I never even dreamed they would approve Areg and not me,” said Ms. Mahyoub. “How was I supposed to be left behind?”

Now Areg and her grandmother live a block away from Mr. Abdulwahab with his brother, his brother’s wife and their five children. There is more space in their apartment, more cousins around to help care for Areg, now four years old, but she still yearns to be with her father.

One recent December afternoon, Areg sensed that her father was preparing to leave the apartment. She jumped into his lap, tiny tears trickling down her cheeks.

Mr. Abdulwahab relented and, taking her hand, led her to Yemen Cafe, a few blocks down the road on 5th Avenue. At the cafe, Areg asked where her mother was. Mr. Abdulwahab never knows how to respond. Squirming in the corner booth, she was blissfully unaware that her mother was in Djibouti and that her father was spending every dollar he had to care for her there.

“Now I can’t save money, whatever I earn I spend on my family,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t handle it, how can I handle it? It is too much.”

Mr. Abdulwahab calls his wife every morning from his car, the sound of her soft voice cutting in and out over Djibouti’s unreliable network. As they talk, the unspoken questions hangs in the air: Will they ever be reunited in America?

“Inshallah,” he says. God willing.