There’s a blurry video on Kinan Alrifai’s phone that she shows off proudly. It’s from November, and it shows her kids, 8 and 10 years old, walking out of the Atlanta airport arrivals terminal.
In the video, Alrifai shrieks and runs toward them. For most of it, all you can see is the back of her white headscarf as she embraces them and the pink painted fingernails of her daughter hugging back. Her son, in a hoodie, looks both happy and a little embarrassed at his mother’s kisses.
“I didn’t even imagine that I would stay here for two years just waiting for them to come,” Alrifai said last week in her apartment in Murfreesboro. “I had no idea. If I had this idea, I would have never left them.”
‘Seeking A Safe Place’
Alrifai came to the U.S. in September 2014. Since then, her children and husband have been living in Lebanon and Turkey. Alrifai has been studying English, working at a textbook warehouse and taking classes at MTSU so she can transfer over her chemistry degree.
But her path to America started about five years ago, in Damascus, Syria. She was a high school chemistry teacher. Her husband ran a clothing business. But, she said, the regime started targeting their family for protesting the president — breaking into their house several times and, at one point, arresting her husband.
The family thought he was lucky to come back alive, and they immediately made plans to flee into neighboring Lebanon.
“Our plan was to stay in Lebanon until the situation gets better. We thought everything would get better soon,” she said.
Things did not get better. That’s apparent in the numbers: When the family arrived in Lebanon, they were among 25,000 Syrian refugees in the country,
according to the United Nations. But within two years, 1.1 million people had fled to Lebanon.
The country made life more and more difficult for refugees, Alrifai said, putting restrictions on where or when they could drive, or what kinds of jobs they could do. “[The Lebanese] don’t want anyone to work, because they want everyone to get out,” she said.
And Alrifai wanted to get out, too. Her husband moved to Turkey to gauge the possibility of settling in Europe. That wasn’t panning out.
Then, she used a lifeline that most of her fellow refugees do not have: Her brother is a pediatrician at Vanderbilt, so Alrifai’s family applied for a travel visa to visit him in Nashville. The American Embassy in Lebanon interviewed them and approved the trip — but just for her, not for her children. She decided it was her only option.
“We were just seeking a safe place for our children to grow up, because we knew at that point that Syria would never get back to its situation,” she said. “Even if the war stops, everything was destroyed. We have no home to go back to.”
Asylum Vs. Refugee
When Alrifai left Lebanon for Nashville, she thought her kids would be able to join her quickly. Instead, her own application for asylum — which would allow her to stay in the U.S. longterm — took nine months to process. There were background checks, then a three-hour interview at the immigration office in Houston, Texas.
“The officers interview you and ask you about everything: why you are applying, what you’re fleeing from, why you’re afraid of going back to your home,” she said. “They know the whole life that we live, how do we live, where do we work, are we educated or not, all this stuff.”
Then, she had another background check run on her. By the end, she said, it felt like the U.S. knew everything about her since she was born.
It’s important to note that Alrifai’s process was similar to that of a traditional refugee, but she is technically an “asylee” — meaning she is not tallied by the
Tennessee Office for Refugees, which resettled 241 Syrian individuals in 2016. It also gave her a slight advantage because she was already on U.S. soil.
“Once you’re in the country, technically we’re violating international law if we send someone back into danger,” said her attorney, Samar Ali. (Ali is a board member of Nashville Public Radio.)
Asylees are also allowed to work in the U.S. while their applications are being processed. In that regard, Ali said, it’s easier to become a permanent resident as an asylee than as a refugee. “The vetting process, however, is the same,” she said.
Then, after Alrifai was granted asylum, her husband and kids could apply through the same process at the embassy in Turkey. That process took another year and a half.
At their final interview last November, her children were approved, but “they told my husband that he had to go through another process, to review his case again,” she said.
This is not an unusual step for the U.S. to take, Ali said.
“It’s going to be more difficult for him as a Syrian male his age,” Ali said. “There’s going to be an extra layer on top of the children’s vetting process.”
Next Move
The final review was only supposed to take a couple of months. But then came President Trump’s executive order, halting all Syrian resettlement. Alrifai said she doesn’t understand it.
“I know the United States has a right to prevent bad stuff inside the country. I’m not against going through all the screening, but I’m against preventing all the people from coming in only because they are Syrian,” she said.
“Are they bad people only because their country has terrorists and they seek a safe place to live? I don’t believe that if the person is really a terrorist, the United States will not know, because they have all the tools to know.”
While Alrifai waits, her life in Murfreesboro is solidifying: She moved into an apartment in Murfreesboro days before her children arrived in Atlanta, decorating their room with bedspreads and pillows from their favorite Disney movies. She sends them to the neighborhood’s public school. She’s working toward getting her chemistry degree equivalency and teaching license.
But she doesn’t want her children to grow up without their father. So if his visa is denied or the executive order is extended, she said, they will move again — even if that means moving back to the place they tried so hard to leave, back to Syria.
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