America has long been the migratory destination for people who want to start a life anew and avoid getting killed. Irish immigrants arrived to flee a famine so bad that it took out 20 percent of the country’s population. Millions of Russian immigrants arrived at the turn of the 20th Century to flee religious persecution and poverty. And German immigrants came to find economic opportunities or to leave behind religious or political persecution.
But this week, President Donald Trump enforced a set of executive orders so harsh that it will keep America’s doors shut to refugees, asylum seekers, and everyone else who could die if they stayed in their home countries.
With the wave of a hand, the smile of a politician, and pen ink to paper, the Trump administration has banned refugees from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. People looking to enter the United States from the southern U.S. border will similarly find themselves detained, and likely quickly deported. These executive orders have numerous consequences for people looking to find safety, a particularly real concern in countries as vast and apart as Syria and El Salvador.
Experts and immigrant advocates have already panned the Trump administration’s decision, with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) calling it a “humanitarian nightmare.”
We bomb your country, creating a humanitarian nightmare, then lock you inside. That's a horror movie, not a foreign policy.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 25, 2017
“We’re not only going to reject refugees in the pipeline already — what we’re going to tell Syrian children that we’re not going to let them in out of fears of terrorism,” Matthew La Corte, Immigration Policy Analyst at the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center, told ThinkProgress. “This is ludicrous and something that will have massive humanitarian effect.”
“Donald Trump is wasting no time taking a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty,” Lynn Tramonte, Deputy Director of America’s Voice Education Fund, said on a press call on Wednesday. “We know that he is moving forward with some of the ugliest anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies that could ever have been dreamt up. This is a dramatic, radical and extreme assault on immigrants and the values of our country.”
Here are just some of the ongoing reasons that people would pick up everything they can carry in a bag and flee their countries.
[Warning: Graphic content]
Syria
Peace talks to end the six-year civil war in Syria are currently fraught, with opposition and government representatives meeting face to face for the first time since 2011. An estimated half a million people have died as a result of the war, and nearly half have fled the country or are internally displaced.
Civilians are not safe even when U.S. and coalition military forces attack the militant group Islamic State in Syria. The human rights group Amnesty International estimated that U.S.-led coalition strikes have killed 300 civilians over two years in efforts to target the Islamic State.
The world may have already moved on from Omar Daqneesh, the five-year-old boy pulled from rubble in east Aleppo last year, but cases like his aren’t unique in Syria.
El Salvador
El Salvador — the world’s most dangerous country — recorded a day without a single homicide for the first time in two years this past week.
The murder rate fell by one-fifth last year, but it still remains one of the most violent countries not at war, with an average of 14.4 homicides every day. Conflicts between security forces and gangs have escalated, with gang members specifically targeting police and members of the MS-13 gangs attacking public and private institutions, Insight Crime reported. The country has seen unrelenting violence in the past few years, driving many people like unaccompanied teenagers who do not want to join the gangs, to undertake a dangerous journey to get to the United States.
