HIMES. Madam Speaker, this Sunday I was out on the road amongst
my constituents when at about midday, I started to get panicked emails
from the doctors of Yale New Haven Hospital because one of their own,
Tarek Alasil, an ophthalmologist of Syrian dissent, an ophthalmologist
who has made his home here in the United States, who has U.S. citizen
children, who has his family in New Haven, had been detained in the
Caribbean in the Bahamas. He had been in the Caribbean doing cataract surgery for people who
might otherwise not have access to the surgery that might allow them to
see again; stepping forward, as all that we think is best about a
country that was founded and strengthened by immigrants abroad, doing
God's work as an ambassador--informal, though, he may have been--that
America is a good and decent place. But he was detained and sat there in the Bahamas detained by the
customs and border patrol, wondering if he would ever see his family
again, wondering if he might ever become the United States citizen that
he hoped to be, wondering if he was going to get sent back to his
native city of Aleppo, which now is a smoking ruin. Of course, we hear story after story like that. The worst I heard was
an elderly lady in her eighties, Hamidyah Al Saeedi.
Keywords matched
border patrol immigrants