Latest news with #PalestinianRefugee
.jpeg%3Ftrim%3D0%2C0%2C0%2C0%26width%3D1200%26height%3D800%26crop%3D1200%3A800&w=3840&q=100)
The Independent
9 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Texas man returns from honeymoon alone after wife is arrested by ICE in US Virgin Islands
A recently-married Texas couple has spent over 120 days apart after the bride was detained by ICE during their honeymoon in the US Virgin Islands. Taahir Shaikh of Arlington says his wife, Ward Sakeik, was detained by ICE in February in St. Thomas, despite having a pending green card application and documentation of her stateless status. 'She's considered stateless, which essentially just means you're born in a country that doesn't give you birthright citizenship. And since she was a Palestinian refugee that was born in Saudi Arabia, they weren't recognized as Saudi nationals,' Shaikh told NBC DFW. Shaikh said Sakeik was just 8 years old when her family arrived in the U.S. on a visa. Although their asylum request was denied, her lack of citizenship meant the government couldn't deport them. Instead, they were placed under an order of supervision and required to check in with immigration authorities once a year. Sakeik was just 8 when her family arrived in America on a visa, her husband told the outlet. Although their asylum request was denied, their lack of citizenship meant the government couldn't deport them. Instead, they were placed under an order of supervision and required to check in with immigration authorities once a year. Since then, Sakeik has graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington and now works as a wedding photographer. She has always complied with immigration rules for 14 years, Shaikh said. Sakeik is currently being held at Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado after spending months detained in McAllen, as her green card application remains stalled due to her detention. The couple has spent the first months of their marriage communicating through weekly visits and video calls. 'She constantly says, 'When I get through this phase of my life, what am I not able to endure after this?'' Shaikh told the outlet about his wife. He says they carefully chose to travel to the U.S. Virgin Islands for their honeymoon, believing it wouldn't jeopardize her pending immigration status. The couple's legal team is doing everything possible to prevent her from being deported. Though stateless individuals in removal proceedings are typically eligible for release after 90 days, Sakeik has now been held for over 120. ICE addressed Sakeik's arrest in a statement to NBC DFW, writing, 'The arrest of Ward Sakeik was not part of a targeted operation by ICE. She chose to leave the country and was then flagged by CBP trying to re-enter the U.S. 'The facts are she is in our country illegally. She overstayed her visa and has had a final order by an immigration judge for over a decade. President Trump and Secretary Noem are committed to restoring integrity to the visa program and ensuring it is not abused to allow aliens a permanent one-way ticket to remain in the U.S.' ICE concluded, 'She had a final order of removal since 2011. Her appeal of the final order was dismissed by the Board of Immigration Appeals on February 12, 2014. She has exhausted her due process rights and all of her claims for relief have been denied by the courts.'
Irish Examiner
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Relief agency that supports stateless Palestinians in Lebanon itself under threat
Nesrine arrived in Lebanon in her mother's womb in 1948. Her parents were forcibly evicted from their home in the coastal city of Haifa, Palestine, during the Nakba, or 'catastrophe,' an Arabic term that refers to mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. She can't remember where she spent her childhood years — 'somewhere in the south,' she dismissively says with a wave of her hand — but can certainly recall with great clarity her years spent living across the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Beirut. Not only did she survive the traumatic exile of her family in utero — but she has lived through a the many massacres of a 15-year civil war, numerous Israeli invasions and bombardments, a global pandemic, a sub-nuclear blast that shattered the city, and — probably the most impactful of all — the moral ignominy of being stateless. Despite being born and spending every moment of her 78 years in Lebanon, she is not entitled to, nor is unlikely to ever receive Lebanese citizenship. Almost the entirety of her existence has been administered by Unrwa, the relief works agency, itself born under duress in 1950, and which now provides all the support a functioning state should to Palestinians. She is one of about 220,000 registered refugees reliant on those supports in Lebanon. Everything I've told you so far about Nesrine's life is fact. The Nakba, as the forcible eviction of Palestinians by Israel, is a fact. Her statelessness within Lebanon is a fact. The violence that has been visited upon the Beirut she's lived in, decade after decade, is all historical fact. What is less certain — what has never been certain — is the future of the entity that supports her, Unrwa. The agency relies annually on the financial commitments of donor countries. Those commitments ebb and flow depending on the appetite of the international community to support Palestinians. That appetite has always been inconsistent, selectively amnesiac — and, as evidenced since October 7, 2023 — prisoner to the whims of Israel, which has made no secret of its desire to dismantle Unrwa. The Palestinian refugee camps around Tyre, Sidon and Beirut suffered greatly during the recent invasion and bombardment by Israel in recent months. Couple that with the coercive posturing of successive US administrations and you are left with an unholy mess of political one-upmanship and subterranean lobbying. It is a mess that reduces people like Nesrine — an elderly woman living below the poverty line in South Beirut — into nothing but a stereotype of embattled resilience. 'Unrwa has always been on the brink,' Dorothée Klaus, the director of Unrwa Affairs in Lebanon tells me from her office in Beirut. 'This state of existential despair is nothing new, but it's never been so acutely felt by Palestinians on the ground. Usually, it is our job [the United Nations] to worry where the money will come from. More than ever, they — the refugees themselves — are aware of it. The elderly. The children. The disabled. The anxiety it causes is crippling.' There are 12 Palestinian refugee camps (PRCs) in Lebanon, stretching from Rashidieh camp, just south of the coastal city of Tyre and only a few from before the Blue Line that separates Lebanon and Israel, to Nahr el-Bared camp, just north of Tripoli. The PRCs around Tyre, Sidon and Beirut suffered greatly during the recent invasion and bombardment by Israel in recent months. Wavel Camp, near Baalbek in the east, has had to shoulder the burden of tens of thousands of additional Palestinian refugees who fled the Assad regime in Syria over the last decade. The camps are not closed — their populations can come and go — but security is tightly controlled by popular committees and various Palestinian factions. In the months before October 2023, internal fighting between these factions within Ayn al-Hilweh — a camp that houses over 70,000 refugees — was so violent it became a no-go area, shutting down all Unrwa operations within. It serves as a stark example of the challenges the agency routinely faces on the ground, regardless of war, genocide and famine ongoing around them. Unrwa essentially provides all the support a functioning state should — primary and vocational education, primary health care, relief and social services, infrastructure and camp improvement, microfinance and emergency response. Crucially, it also provides employment opportunities. 'We had 15,000 applicants for one job as maintenance person,' Nuha Hamoud, a Palestinian Unrwa officer tells me as we walk the intricate streets of Mar Elias refugee camp. '15,000! More than anything, it's the lack of prospects for young people that has the most devastating effect on their lives. Depression and despair are more damaging than hunger. 'As a people, we've always valued education so much, and Unrwa gave us that. Now, our children… even if they stay in school, they wonder for what?' That despair is leading many Palestinian youths to turn to criminality and — most devastatingly of all — drugs. It's a trend Nuha says is sweeping the camps and young men especially are succumbing to the lure of amphetamines like Captagon — an addictive, amphetamine-type stimulant mass produced in neighbouring Syria — with disastrous consequences. 'The cycle is so familiar. The boredom and despair lead them to become addicted. With no income to feed the addiction, they commit crime. That crime often involves trafficking or selling the drugs. 'It's heartbreaking to watch, and heartbreaking for their families.' Nuha Hamoud of Unrwa: 'More than anything, it's the lack of prospects for young people that has the most devastating effect on their lives. Depression and despair are more damaging than hunger.' Lebanon's denial of citizenship to Palestinians born in the country is a highly controversial position, and one which highlights the difficult relationship between the Lebanese people and their Palestinian neighbours, dating all the way back to the Nakba itself. Then, Lebanon took in about 100,000 of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes by Israel. To reverse their decision now, the argument goes, would be to give Israel what it wants, thereby making the dubious case that, by denying them citizenship and restricting their labour rights, Lebanon is doing it for the good of the Palestinian refugees. It's a brittle case, and one that crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. For the two decades that followed the Nakba, evidence of armed resistance within Palestinian communities in Lebanon was negligible, but following the six-day war in 1967, the emergence of Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation lit a fire of revolution under Palestinians everywhere. Not long after Arafat's ascension, Lebanon became the PLO's de facto base. This — perhaps understandably — proved incredibly divisive in Beirut. The Nakba was not a problem of Lebanon's making, yet its consequences had just painted a luminous target on its back. While sympathy existed with the Muslim community for the Palestinian cause, the Christian political class saw the presence of the PLO as a threat to the country's delicate sectarian balance. That paranoia suited Israel's agenda, and so they supported the creation of Christian militias — the most notorious of whom was the Phalange, a vicious right-wing group that benefited directly from Israeli weapons and training. The PLO's presence was far from the only reason for the Civil War in 1975 but was a major contributing factor. Such was Arafat's influence, some areas of the south were known as "Fatah Land", while the "Fakhani Republic" emerged in west Beirut, a nod to the neighbourhood of the capital where the main PLO headquarters was located. Inevitably for the Palestinians, the bloodiest chapters of that sorry conflict belong to them. The notorious Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982 was a relentless bloodbath which saw nearly 3,500 civilians — mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias — slaughtered by Israeli-backed Christian militias, supported by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that had surrounded Beirut's Sabra neighbourhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp. It lasted 72 hours. 'When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting,' wrote Robert Fisk of what he encountered in Chatila, hours after the killing stopped. 'Down every alleyway, there were corpses — women, young men, babies and grandparents — lying together in a lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. The civil war would continue for another eight years. Which somehow brings us back to Nesrine: 78 years old (the same age as my mother), waiting patiently at an Unrwa medical clinic within a few hundred yards of where those massacres took place. Waiting for medication to treat a pair of eyes that have seen far too much. Her little house shook every night for 60 nights, she told me, as Israel bombed close to her home in October and November last year. It is hard to ask a woman who has lived through such things what she thinks of Trump and Netanyahu. Of Gaza. Of Jerusalem. Of Nablus and Jenin. Of a homeland she never saw and will sadly never see. She has no children, so whatever dream of Haifa her own mother passed on will tragically die with her. You can't help but feel that for those that made it so, this was the plan all along.
