Pakistani Christian family hopeful to stay in US as refugee despite Trump travel ban

Washington: A Pakistani Christian family, scheduled to arrive in the US next week on June 06 as refugee, has expressed hope they would be able to start their new lives there despite President Donald Trump’s ban on refugees for 120 days.

Shaz Sadiq, 42, whose father was in a church shooting, said, “This restriction is not for us. We will make it.”

Shez Sadiq along with her mother and sister will arrive in US on June 06 after being approved two weeks ago to fly to the United States as a refugee.

Sadiq hopes to find work as a translator, her profession in Pakistan.

She fled and has spent the last four years in Bangkok, Thailand, applying for refugee status and permanent resettlement in a place safe for Christians.

Sadiq, who has no relatives in the United States and has never been in the country, could be among the last refugees of her kind admitted to the U.S. — at least for a while — now that the Supreme Court has revived President Trump’s travel ban.

US President Donald Trump´s order to block arrivals from six mainly Muslim countries took partial effect Thursday after he won a Supreme Court victory over rights groups.

But implementation of the order after five months of legal challenges could be chaotic, in part due to the meaning of a key term used in the court´s ruling Monday: "bona fide."

The court said that Trump could only ban travelers from the targeted countries "who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States."

With exceptions for people with a “bona fide relationship” to schools, employers, family or other U.S. entities, the ban will block admissions of people from six majority-Muslim countries for 90 days as the government evaluates its vetting procedures.

Pakistan is not on that list. But the travel order also bans refugees from all countries for 120 days.

According to a Los Angeles Times report, though Sadiq, her sister, Rahila, and their mother, Doris, passed a vetting process that took years, they plan to celebrate only after passing customs agents and stepping foot on American soil.

 “Our heart is dead with so many things,” she said. “We don’t have excitement. Maybe we will once we get to America,” the report said.

She said she hopes that anti-immigrant views in the U.S. won’t affect her family.

“If you have a guest in your house and the guest does not follow the rules, you have to understand if the guest has problems,” she said. “But we are not troublemakers. We are friendly, polite women. We want to live our own lives. We are not going to be a bother.”