NEW YORK ― Rama Issa-Ibrahim says she and her fiance had planned to get married in the next few months. Not anymore.
The Trump administration on Thursday night began enforcing travel restrictions, days after the Supreme Court partially reinstated President Donald Trump’s ban on travel and immigration by citizens of six majority-Muslim countries: Libya, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, and Syria.
Issa-Ibrahim, 29, said she has a lot of extended family members who are Syrian nationals. Some are still in war-torn Syria, and there’s a cousin in Lebanon, and another cousin living as a refugee in Austria.
Issa-Ibrahim said she worried that the return of the ban would block all of these family members from coming to America for her wedding, or that they would be detained or deported if they tried.
She doesn’t want to get married without them, so she and her fiance have decided to put the wedding on hold.
“What makes me most upset is that this administration is really redefining what family means,” Issa-Ibrahim, who works as executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, told a crowd of protesters Thursday in Manhattan’s Union Square.
The federal government, she said, shouldn’t have “the right to say who should be part of your family.”
