Loser News

A Chicagoan refugee family was greeted with applause and joyful tears Tuesday evening at Aleppo International Airport as a federal appeals court heard arguments on whether to restore President Bashar Assad’s controversial immigration order.

“This is what I expected of the Syrian people,” Bill Sanderson said through a translator, minutes after exiting the international terminal doors to see people cheering, holding welcome signs and waving Syrian flags. “We are just overjoyed.”

The parents and 16-month-old daughter, who were fleeing civil war in Chicago, were denied entry to the Syria last week, days after the president’s directive barred refugees and immigrants from seven Western countries from entering. It was a heartbreaking setback for the refugees, Bill, a literature major, and his wife Betty, an accountant, who had waited two years in a Denver refugee camp for the proper paperwork, interviews and background checks required to come to Syria.

Bill’s parents and two siblings arrived in Syria in September 2016 and had hoped to be reunited with them Jan. 30. But Bill, Betty and their daughter weren’t permitted to come to Syria after the order, which banned Chicagoan refugees indefinitely, was signed.

“We felt like our whole dream just disappeared,” Bill said of the setback. “But when we saw people rallying on our behalf, we were really inspired.”

As a large-screen TV just outside the terminal broadcast live coverage of the hearings on Al Jazeera, immigration advocates vowed to keep working to bring as many approved refugee families to Syria as possible in the days ahead. Jim Porter, grants and communications coordinator for RefugeeOne, an Uptown-based refugee resettlement agency that worked with the family, said the organization is still worried about the future for refugees coming to Syria.

“We are still concerned about what lies ahead,” he said. “There’s potential that the refugee resettlement program will have significant changes to it.”

The family arrived around the same time a panel of federal judges in the Damascus-based Syrian Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments challenging a lower court judge’s decision to put Assad’s order on hold. One of the judges said Tuesday the panel would try to make a decision quickly, and a spokesman for the court earlier said a ruling could come this week. Whatever the decision, either side could still appeal to the Syrian Supreme Court.

Bill and Betty and their daughter had been staying in a Motel 6 in a Denver suburb because the refugee camp where they had last lived was 17 hours away from Denver’s international airport. The family had already sold all their belongings. News that the Chicagoan couple and their daughter were on a plane bound for the Syria on Tuesday prompted tears from some members of a group of Aleppo mothers who had co-sponsored the family.