In Bismarck, One Refugee Resettlement Office Grapples With Trump’s Order

Turdukan Tostokova was putting the finishing touches on creating new homes in America for two sets of elderly Iraqi refugees scheduled to arrive tomorrow. She’d been planning for months for their arrival in Bismarck, North Dakota. She had their rent checks ready to hand over to landlords and was preparing the final details before their arrival.

“I was going to go buy beds today. I was going to buy food tomorrow morning. Everything was planned,” Tostokova, a site supervisor for the refugee resettlement program at Lutheran Social Services, told TPM in an interview Monday afternoon.

Then came the President Donald Trump’s executive order late Friday that halted the refugee program for 120 days and put a 90-day ban on immigration from seven majority Muslim countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Sudan and Libya. The effects of the ban are just beginning to be fully realized.

On Monday afternoon, Tostokova got the official word: The families she’d hope to be reuniting wouldn’t get that opportunity.

“At first, I didn’t want to cancel anything, and I didn’t want to have any conversations,” Tostokova said. “One hour ago, I got official travel cancellations. I called the landlords. Now, everything is canceled. I will be meeting with families.”

The order immediately spurred confusion and chaos in the United States as airport officials, immigration advocates and law enforcement tried to interpret the orders. The New York Times reported Monday morning that the secretary of Homeland Security literally was on the phone getting his first briefing on the order as the President was signing it.

In Bismarck, the order has been devastating for three families.

Tostokova had a sense the order was coming. Refugee advocates had been waiting for the Trump administration to do something. OnThursday, she met with Rami Behnam, the son of one of the elderly refugee couples and an Iraqi refugee himself who moved to the United States in 2015 to flee ISIS. By Saturday morning, his parents had called him to say their travel arrangements to the U.S. had been cancelled.

“I feel very, very sad,” Behnam said Monday in an interview with TPM through an interpreter. ” All my family. especially my kids, they want their grandparents to come and join them here. They miss them.”

Behnam has been waiting for several years to be reunited with his parents who he says cannot return to Iraq because they are Christians from ISIS-held territory. At 74 and 65 respectively, Behnam’s father and mother suffer from health problems. Behnam fears his parents are living with very little after they surrendered most of their belongings to others in preparation for their relocation to the United States.

“They give up everything,” Rami says. “They give everything away to many people.”

Their plane was supposed to land in the United States on Tuesday night at 10:30 p.m..

Behnam’s case is just one of three reunifications that were supposed to happen in Bismarck, North Dakota in upcoming weeks that Tostokova warns may never happen now.

One other case also involved an elderly refugee couple from Iraq. They were also supposed to be on that Tuesday night flight. A third case involves two teenagers trying to reunite with their Congolese mother. She hasn’t seen them for more than a decade. The Congo is not one of the countries from which people are banned from immigrating to the U.S., but Tostokova says there is a lot of concern that the vetting process the children underwent – which included a health screening– could expire within the 120 days that the refugee program will be suspended.

“They may have to start over. These kids may not come this year,” Tostokova said

Bismarck, North Dakota, is of course, just one place that has been affected by Trump’s orders, but the upheaval in one corner of the country that Trump won 63 percent of the vote in, is revealing of a bigger crisis that is happening on the ground and in the refugee resettlement community at large.

“There is a sense of a loss of hope … a number of individuals now don’t know if they will ever join their families,” said Bill Canny, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops migration and refugee services. “People have been out renting houses for refugees they expected to come.”

For now, it’s unclear what will happen to families who were expecting their loved ones to arrive in Bismarck. After speaking with TPM, Rami Behnam had his own question.

“Do you think your story can help my parents?” he asked.