Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy promises to introduce a bill to overturn Trump’s executive order this week, although since Congress and the Senate are both Republican controlled it has very little to no chance of passing.
Chris Murphy(@ChrisMurphyCT)
The law is clear. The #MuslimBan is illegal. I will introduce a bill this week to immediately overturn this dangerous, hateful order.January 29, 2017
Reporter Alice Ross has been speaking to people affected by the travel ban, and people suddenly being cut off from those they love is a recurrent theme.
She spoke to a gay US citizen who was tantalizingly close to being able to bring his Iranian fiancé to the US:
I am a US citizen by birth and a gay male. When travelling in Iran as a tourist I met a Kurdish Iranian, also a gay male and we fell in love. I applied for a K1 Fiancé Visa and my petition was approved. Last November we travelled to Turkey where my fiancé had his interview at the US Embassy in Ankara. After two months of processing and vetting the visa was approved three days before President Trump took office.When I heard the news about the executive order, I wanted to vomit. If my fiancé stays in Iran he will never be able to live freely and could be executed for his sexual orientation.Our concern is that we’re going to miss the window of opportunity to get the visa - we only have until mid-April - which would mean we’d have to begin the process all over again. It’s so frustrating because we thought we’d made it, that we’d actually succeeded in demonstrating to the government that we had a legitimate relationship…We were celebrating. We were to meet in Istanbul in March, send his passport to the embassy to get the visa, and enjoy some time together in Turkey before he finishes his Masters. Then he was going to fly here and it was going to be a happy ever after kind of story. And now the whole bottom has dropped out of everything.
Boston anti-travel ban rally begins with huge crowds
Hundreds of people already in Copley Square, Boston, for a rally against the travel ban executive order.
From a WBUR (Boston’s NPR affiliate) reporter:
Jack Lepiarz(@Lepiarz)
Copley Square in Boston, marching against POTUS' exec order on immigration ban. # pic.twitter.com/soat8ab3Y9January 29, 2017
From a Boston Globe reporter:
David Abel(@davabel)
Orange Line is packed as Bostonians head to protest Trump's #MuslimBan. pic.twitter.com/BdVUMXmWFjJanuary 29, 2017
A local TV network is flying over the rally, with live video showing huge crowds and packed streets. The rally started at 1pm.
Updated
Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-born writer who lives in London, writes about the personal impact of the travel ban:
I now cannot travel to the US, a country I visit frequently and in which I have work interests, close family and dear friends. It is a curious feeling, a new feeling. One that collapses space-time and connects you to all those before you who have found themselves on the ugly end of a collective insanity. It is a feeling that rocks the very ground on which you thought we all stood.Suddenly, all certainties look shaky. Residencies, passports, green cards, jobs, mortgages, friends, marriages – all the things you thought fortified you against the mobilisation of state machinery – dissolve. You are only a Muslim. And what does that mean? It is a tag that defies definition, becoming more elusive the more you try to pin it down. I was reminded of a scene from a dramatisation of Roots author Alex Haley’s life, when he, dressed proudly in his US Coast Guard uniform and sporting his medals, confidently asks for a hotel room for the night for him and his wife. When he is refused one for being black, he returns to his car enraged – not at those who denied him but at himself for thinking he was exempt. “All they saw was a monkey.”
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