A protest in Downtown Minneapolis against President Trump's immigration executive order, the Muslim ban, and border wall. January 31, 2017. Picture by Tony Webster / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Some rights reserved. In the wake of the travel ban introduced by the Trump administration in January 2017, we read a lot about the affected people: those with visas and tickets barred from flight in airports, those in planes thousands of feet above the ground when the order was signed and got off unaware, finding themselves in detention, including the elderly on wheelchairs, seven-year-olds in handcuffs, so on and so forth.
There is another portion of the affected whose stories have gone mostly unnoticed: hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the listed countries who were not travelling or expecting travelers. They were living their lives, and one day, due to the stroke of a pen, they were relegated to second-degree immigrants. They were Kafkaesquely punished without having ever been accused of a crime, let alone committing one. Many of those people went through enormous psychological pressure. Some left the country, many stayed but developed a starkly different idea of America.
Those stories are not dramatic enough to be widely reported by the media. Yet, like other cases of flagrant injustice, they are worth being told.
