(AP) Mohammed Hafar paced around the airport terminal — first to the monitor to check flight arrivals, then to the gift shop and lastly to the doors where international passengers were exiting.
At last, out came Jana Hafar, his tall, slender, dark-haired teen daughter who had been forced by President Donald Trump’s travel ban to stay behind in Syria for months while her father, his wife and 10-year-old son started rebuilding their lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with no clear idea of when the family would be together again.
“Every time I speak to her, she ask, ‘When are they going to give me the visa?'” the elder Hafar said, recalling the days of uncertainty that took up the better part of this year. There was “nothing I could tell her, because nobody knows when.”