Diamond DeDual is ashamed to be an American.
The 27-year-old hairstylist lives in Cuba, Mo. That’s Donald Trump country. Nearly 80 percent of voters in Crawford County voted for the nation’s new president in the November election.
But one of Trump’s first actions has been devastating to DeDual’s family.
Four months ago, she and her husband, Mariwan, had their first child, Arrow.
Thanks to the president’s executive order barring immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for at least four months, Diamond isn’t sure when she’s going to see her husband next, or when he will see his son.
He’s stuck in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, caught in a presidential crackdown on immigrants and refugees that is splitting American families.
“I’m completely shocked that, as an American, I’m even having this conversation,” DeDual told me Wednesday.
She and Mariwan met in Rolla.
He was a student at Missouri University of Science and Technology, working on a master’s degree in petroleum engineering. Mariwan is Muslim in the way that a lot of St. Louisans are Catholic. It’s the faith of his father, but he doesn’t actively practice. He was in the country legally on an F-1 student visa.
The couple got married in Iraq in September 2015 and lived there for about a year.
“Every single person I came in contact with was so friendly,” Diamond says of her time in Kurdistan. “They love Americans.”
When she became pregnant, the couple decided Diamond should come back to Missouri to have the baby. The healthcare was better, and Mariwan’s job prospects would be, too. So they started a new visa process, this time applying for a spouse visa.
The case was approved by the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Service, says their St. Louis-based attorney, Jim Hacking. It was forwarded to the National Visa Center. Mariwan went to the U.S. Embassy for the final step of the process, a personal interview. He left his passport with them and was supposed to get it back this week.
Then Jan. 27 happened. Trump instituted a ban on immigrants entering the country if they came from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq. His executive order also stopped Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. The order created chaos as various federal departments hadn’t been consulted and weren’t sure how to react when immigrants already flying to the U.S. landed at airports. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained a stay on a portion of the order, allowing those who had entered the country under legal visas to stay.
But that didn’t help the DeDuals.
Before Diamond flew back to Missouri, the couple sold most of their possessions to prepare for a new life together in the United States. Without his passport, however, Mariwan is now stuck, separated from his wife and son, unable to complete the immigration process in which he had already been vetted twice, once as a student, and again as a spouse of an American citizen.
“He can’t go anywhere right now,” Diamond says of her husband. “He’s living on the floor with a teapot and a space heater.”
The nation’s immigration system was already broken, Hacking says. Now Trump has thrown it into “utter chaos.”
“American citizens who are married to individuals from the seven Muslim countries are being denied the ability to bring their spouses to the U.S.,” Hacking says. “This is true despite months and months of processing and vetting by USCIS and the State Department. The procedures are already in place to check their criminal background, and they have to go through an interview. My citizen clients are being treated as second-class citizens with no individualized determination that their spouse did anything wrong. It’s not fair.”
Diamond and Arrow are living with Diamond’s father. She talks to Mariwan by iPhone and Facebook. She waits, and watches her baby grow, and wonders how much of his early life his father will miss.
But thanks to President Trump, he’s isolated from his American family, kept out of the U.S., because of the faith of his father.
“I am absolutely ashamed of being an American right now,” Diamond says. “Nobody ever treated me this badly in a Muslim country.”
Tony Messenger is a columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and worked previously at the Springfield News-Leader and Columbia Tribune.