On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court upheld Trump’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority nations, sparking uproar from immigration activists and those directly affected by the ban, including former refugee Hamdia Ahmed.
In recent weeks, Hamdia Ahmed has been thinking a lot about her experience as a refugee. Her family escaped the civil war in Somalia in 1997 and crossed the border to settle into a camp in Kenya. She was just a few weeks old at the time.
“My parents had to leave everything behind,” Ahmed, now 20, told Broadly. “You’re starting all over with nothing but food provided by the UN and plastic shelters. It was very difficult. My mom literally had me while she was escaping … no medication, no hospital, nothing. People told her, ‘You’re not going to survive. You need to leave this child and abandon her. You need to run for your life.’ She was like, ‘No, I’m going to keep all my five kids together.’”
Ahmed is now a college student and aspiring model living in Portland, Maine, who dreams of working for the UN one day. (Last year, she spoke in front of the global organization to advocate for more education funding for refugee children.) After spending seven years in the Kenyan camp, her family qualified for refugee resettlement status through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and moved to the United States in 2005. She still has an uncle and cousins waiting to immigrate here; her grandmother was also planning to join them, but passed away last month.
Whether or not Ahmed will ever be reunited with her extended family, however, is now uncertain: On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s latest ban on travel from several Muslim-majority nations, including Somalia. “I’m outraged,” Ahmed said about the ruling, adding, “This isn’t [about] national security; it’s about an anti-Muslim agenda.”