[A version of this article was given as a speech at the San Francisco “No Ban No Wall” Rally on February 4, 2017. You can view the video here.]
Airports are sacred spaces, representing freedom as well as the promise of reunification. Although President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and creating a de-facto religious test for new immigrants has been stayed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month, the fight to protect immigrants, refugees, and our airport sanctuaries is far from over.
I understand the sanctity of airports through my own personal experience.
In 1979, my life changed forever: My school shut down indefinitely, civil unrest erupted and grew, and the last Shah of Iran fled. Weeks later, I was in the streets of Tehran with my mother and a sea of other protesters as the would-be founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile from Paris.
Over the coming year, excitement gave way to heartbreak with the realization that mullahs had stolen the revolution. Mari, our 18-year old Kurdish neighbor, was arrested for passing out pamphlets. We never saw her again. At first, I was forced to cover at school, then in shops, until finally not a strand of hair on my 9-year old head could be seen again in public. One year later, Iraq bombed Iran and the eight-year-war begun. Red sirens blasted on the radio throughout the city, warning of incoming Iraqi bombs and scud missiles, constantly throwing us into a panic as we ran for cover.
When I was twelve years old, my dad, who lived in San Francisco, had returned to Iran. He brought with him a most precious offering — two crisp, new navy-blue American passports for my sister and I. “A war-torn autocracy is no place for children,” my father told my mother. My mother could not leave Iran but did what she thought was best for her daughters — she allowed us to go to the United States. I did not live with her for the next ten years. Friends say she had scabs on her cheeks off and on for a year, from wiping away so many tears.
When I left my mother behind, I intuitively adopted a solemn reverence for airports, spaces which hold the purest of human emotion, the way birthing rooms and death beds do.
My sister and I would visit our mother in Iran every year or two, and the days of our departure back to the States were mostly the same: My mom would pick fights with us to push us and the pain of our departure away. My uncle would compulsively stand on the scale, weighing himself with each suitcase, sometimes a dozen times per bag, ensuring they were not a gram over the allowable limit.
Our flights to Europe would always leave Iran at dawn. A caravan of two or three dozen friends, cousins, aunts and uncles would drive to the airport at midnight. They would all wait for our plane to take off, despite our pleas to go home and get some rest. My grandmother would hold onto us and cry, “I am not going to see you again!” The rest of us would hold back our tears, refuting her words, but knowing she would eventually be right. At the moment of lift-off, I would lean against my sister and pass out exhausted, my eyes red and puffy from crying.
Even after all these years of traveling as an adult, I habitually scan the airport for dazed faces rushing about inside the terminal, in search of those souls to whom that moment means the world: loved ones holding each other weeping, not knowing when they will see each other again; families joyously embracing, reuniting after too many years apart, pretending they do not see how the other has aged; and mostly, families leaving behind their broken lives and seeking refuge in a new homeland with no one to greet them, scared but standing brave so their children won’t know that they too do not know what tomorrow will bring.
Immigration is about love, hope, and humanity.
Our country’s immigration policy must reflect values of human decency, and be true to the promises America makes to the world: acceptance of the tired, hungry, huddled masses, those escaping political persecution, migrant workers on whose back the American economy is built, and the heartbreak of our generation — refugees from war torn Syria and Yemen.
Upholding these promises means loving each other as we do our own. We cannot look away as children drown and wash up on shores, while the “lucky ones” refuse to let go of the paramedics who have pulled them out of rubble. We are all worth saving. We are all legal.
Over the past few weeks, airports have turned into battlegrounds for humanity, in danger of becoming places of exclusion and intolerance — places in which an infant with a heart condition is turned away, or a 5-year-old boy is detained alone for five hours. As many as 100,000 refugees have been affected by the ban.
But still, airports remain sacred.
Citizens are showing up to protect that space, and I am filled with immense gratitude and hope. We saw a picture of a Muslim and Jewish child on the shoulders of their fathers, holding signs of peace and love. For the first time, we saw rallies filled with people of all creeds at airports throughout the U.S. and around the world. We saw concerned citizens show up with free pizza and halal food for those enduring long hours in terminals and baggage claim carousels. We saw lawyers volunteering through the night, hunched over their laptops on airport floors. We saw Muslims kneeling in prayer at the Detroit airport on borrowed protest banners, while other protesters stood around them, protecting them as a human shield.
Amid the chaos of the implementation of the infamous executive order, we took our airports back. We stood up for humanity.
And we will continue to fight to preserve common sense, compassion, and our country’s cherished values at airports and other points of entry into the United States.
We are fighting not just for immigrants and refugees, but for the soul of our nation.
And so, perhaps against the odds, we can and must win.
