A Stanford University graduate student who was on a flight from Sudan to New York at the time President Donald Trump signed an immigration order was briefly handcuffed and then detained at JFK airport for five hours before being released Saturday morning, according to college officials.
The Sudanese student, who is studying anthropology at the university, is a legal U.S. resident and holds a green card. She’s not immediately returning to California, but the university has offered her support.
“She may release a statement later, but right now she’s very tired,” said Lisa Lapin, a spokeswoman for Stanford. The university declined earlier to release the student’s name, but The New York Times identified her as 39-year-old Nisrin Omer and said she has lived in the United States since 1993 and is also a Harvard University graduate.
Customs officials spent hours asking about her travels, her academic research and her views on Sudanese politics, she told the media outlet.
“For the brief moment I was handcuffed, I couldn’t control myself and I just started crying,” Omer told The New York Times. “It was humiliating. I thought I was going to be returned to Sudan.”
She claimed that customs officials appeared confused and were apologetic to the detained travelers. One of them told her: “I have to do this.”
The student was returning from a research trip late Friday, according to an email sent to the Stanford community on Saturday that was obtained by this newspaper.
“While thankfully she was released, we are enormously concerned about the anguish this episode caused our student and her family, and what it may suggest for others in similar situations. An unfortunate consequence of the new policy appears to be that students and scholars from designated countries are, for the moment, effectively detainees in this country,” wrote Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and other top college officials.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily barred all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days and blocks the acceptance of Syrian refugees indefinitely. The order also blocked citizens of Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, which are predominately Muslim countries, from entering the United States for 90 days.
Lapin said that the Sudanese student was the only one the university has identified who was abroad at the time Trump signed the order. “The students in the countries listed have been notified to not plan travel in the immediate future,” she said.
Trump said that he signed the order as part of an effort to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists.”
But the executive action is already impacting immigrants and students who are returning to the United States from other countries, sparking confusion at airports. Senior administration officials clarified to media outlets that the order would impact green card holders who are travelling from the seven countries listed and they would need to apply for a waiver to return to the United States.
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Trump denied that the order was a “Muslim ban” in remarks to reporters.
“We were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports. You see it all over. It’s working out very nicely and we’re going to have a very, very strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years,” he told reporters on Saturday.
Students weren’t the only ones, though, who spent hours detained at the New York airport, fueling criticism of the immigration order.
Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who worked as an interpreter for the United States during the Iraq War, told reporters that he was detained for nearly 19 hours at JFK. He was one of two Iraqis with ties to the U.S. military who are suing Trump and the U.S. government after they were detained, according to media reports. The men, who are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups, claim in the lawsuit that their detention violated their Fifth Amendment procedural and substantive due process rights.
“What I do for this country? They put the cuffs on,” Darweesh told reporters. “You know how many soldiers I touch by this hand?”
On Saturday, protests were igniting at the JFK airport, San Francisco International airport and others throughout the nation. Following a request from the ACLU, a federal judge in New York blocked deportations nationwide for people who were detained when they entered the United States after Trump’s immigration order.
On week one, Donald Trump suffered his first loss in court.
— ACLU (@ACLU) January 29, 2017
Association of American Universities President Mary Sue Coleman said in a statement the organization recognize the importance of a strong visa process to our nation’s security, but the order is already causing damage and should end as quickly as possible.
“The order is stranding students who have been approved to study here and are trying to get back to campus, and threatens to disrupt the education and research of many others,” Coleman said.
