Yemeni Mother Gets Travel Ban Waiver to Visit Dying Son in California

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/yemen-mom-travel-ban-dying-son.html

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The mother of a child on life support in California was granted a visa waiver to enter the United States after her application was stalled because she is from Yemen, one of the countries included in President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.

The mother’s plea to see her dying child received widespread news coverage in recent days, as the boy’s father begged the federal government to allow his wife to enter the country.

The waiver was approved on Tuesday morning, and the mother, Shaima Swileh, 21, will land in San Francisco on Wednesday evening and see her son for the first time in months.

The boy, Abdullah, 2, has a degenerative brain condition and has been hospitalized at the U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital, in Oakland, Calif., since October.

The boy and his father, Ali Hassan, arrived in Stockton, Calif., from Cairo that month in search of better care. Mr. Hassan is an American citizen and a resident of Stockton.

Doctors realized soon after they arrived that Abdullah’s condition was worsening and that his chances of survival were rapidly decreasing. They decided to place him on life support.

“I was hopeless,” said Mr. Hassan, 22, in an interview. “I literally did not know what to do with my life. My son was on life support, my wife was in Cairo and I was lonely.”

Mr. Hassan said he talked to his wife every day to update her on their son’s deteriorating health.

“I would send her photos. I even made the doctors have a conference call with her, and they told her our son is not getting any better,” Mr. Hassan said. “It was a nightmare. All I got from her was pain and crying.”

Omar Jadwat, the director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said had it not been for the media attention surrounding the case, Ms. Swileh’s visa application would likely still be pending.

“There is this waiver process that people can apply for, so you can apply to be essentially excluded from the ban,” Mr. Jadwat said. “But until there was a lot of news coverage with this family’s situation, they didn’t consider this a case that was worthy for a waiver.”

The couple married in Yemen in February 2016 and the following year they traveled to Cairo to apply for an I-130 visa, or a visa for a relative who is not American. Ms. Swileh had her first interview at the United States Embassy in Cairo last November.

“They got indications that things were going well,” Saad Sweilem, Mr. Hassan’s lawyer, said. “They would check their case online and would reach out because of their sick baby.”

Ms. Swileh went to the embassy for her second interview in January, when she was informed that because of the travel ban, her application could not proceed unless she qualified for a waiver, Mr. Sweilem said. In August, Ms. Swileh was asked to come in for a third interview, where she was told that the State Department was reviewing her eligibility for the waiver.

As the couple waited, Abdullah’s condition worsened, so Mr. Hassan made the harrowing decision to bring his son to the United States without his wife.

Last week, Mr. Hassan began considering removing his son from life support.

“I didn’t know what to do, to be honest,” Mr. Hassan said. “He was on life support for a month and it isn’t good for him.”

A social worker from the hospital reached out to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group known as CAIR. The organization put Mr. Hassan in touch with Mr. Sweilem on Friday.

Mr. Hassan received a call early Tuesday morning telling him that his wife had been granted a waiver. “That was the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” Mr. Hassan said.

He has not yet decided how he wants to proceed with his son’s medical care, and plans to speak with his wife. “I will let her make that decision.”