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Refugees and green card holders refused entry to the US as Donald Trump's anti-Muslim order comes into force

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New York: President Donald Trump's executive order closing the nation's borders to refugees was put into immediate effect on Friday night. Refugees who were in the air on the way to the United States when the order was signed were stopped and detained at airports.

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There were further reports that five Iraqi passengers and one Yemeni had been barred from boarding an EgyptAir flight from Cairo to New York as the US ban on entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries came ito force. 

A UN refugee agency spokesman said it was not yet known whether any of the affected passengers had already been granted visas under the US refugee programme.

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The five Iraqis had arrived in transit from Erbil and were being held at the airport until they could be re-boarded on flights back to Iraq, whereas the Yemeni passenger had arrived at the airport from elsewhere in Cairo, they added.

Dutch airline KLM also confirmed it had refused passengers carriage to the US on Saturday.

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The detentions at US airports, meanwhile, prompted legal challenges as lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy Airport filed a writ of habeas corpus early Saturday in the Eastern District of New York seeking to have their clients released. At the same time, they filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry.

Mr Trump's order, which suspends entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, created a legal limbo for individuals on the way to the United States and panic for families who were awaiting their arrival. The order has thrown into doubt a US agreement to resettle refugees from Australian-sponsored detainment centres.

The executive order, which Mr Trump said was part of an extreme vetting plan to keep out "radical Islamic terrorists," also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: he ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.

Mr Trump's order stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and it bars entry into the United States for 90 days from anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

The ban extends to people already holding green cards that have until now made them legal permanent US residents, said Gillian Christensen, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.

It was unclear how many immigrants and refugees were being held nationwide in the aftermath of the executive order, but the move essentially restricts some green card holders from leaving the US for fear of being barred re-entry

Officials were also stopping travellers with dual Canadian and Iranian citizenship from boarding planes in Canada that were headed the United States, said Mana Yegani, an immigration lawyer in Houston, who works with the American Immigration Lawyers Association. 

"These are people that are coming in legally. They have jobs here and they have vehicles here," she said. "Just because Trump signed something at 6pm yesterday, things are coming to a crashing halt. It's scary."

Formal legal complaints were filed by a prominent group including the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Centre, the National Immigration Law Centre, Yale Law School's Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organisation and the firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

The lawyers said that one of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the US government in Iraq for 10 years. The other, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife, who had worked for a US contractor, and young son, the lawyers said.

They said both men were detained at the airport Friday night after arriving on separate flights. The attorneys said they were not allowed to meet with their clients, and there were tense moments as they tried to reach them.

"Who is the person we need to talk to?" asked one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

"Mr President," said a Customs and Border Protection agent, who declined to identify himself. "Call Mr Trump."

In the arrivals hall at Terminal 4 of Kennedy Airport, Mr Doss and two other lawyers fought fatigue as they tried to learn the status of their clients on the other side of the security perimeter.

"We've never had an issue once one of our clients was at a port of entry in the United States," Mr Doss said. "To see people being detained indefinitely in the country that's supposed to welcome them is a total shock.

"These are people with valid visas and legitimate refugee claims who have already been determined by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to be admissible and to be allowed to enter the US and now are being unlawfully detained."

A supervisor for Customs and Border Protection at Kennedy Airport declined to comment, referring questions to public affairs officials. Calls to officials in Washington and New York were not returned early Saturday morning.

According to the filing, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was granted a special immigrant visa on January 20, the same day as Mr Trump's inauguration. He worked with the United States in Iraq in a variety of jobs as an interpreter, engineer and contractor over the course of roughly a decade.

Mr Darweesh worked as an interpreter for the Army's 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul starting shortly after the invasion of Iraq on April 1, 2003. The filing said that he was directly targeted twice for working with the US military.

A husband and father of three, he arrived at Kennedy Airport Friday evening with his family. Mr Darweesh's wife and children made it through passport control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection stopped and detained him.

Mr Alshawi was supposed to be reunited with his wife, who has been living in Texas. The wife, who asked to be identified by her first initial of D. out of concern for her and her family's safety, wiped away tears as she sat on a couch in her sister's house early Saturday, in a Houston suburb.

The woman, a 32-year-old who was born in Iraq, met her husband while both were students at a Baghdad college. The couple has one child, a 7-year-old son, who is in first grade. The boy was asleep in the house at 3am local time on Saturday, oblivious to the fact that his father was in the United States, but under detention and the possible threat of return to Iraq.

Relatives crowded the living room in their pyjamas and slippers, making and receiving phone calls to and from other relatives and the refugee's lawyers. At times, D. was so emotional she had trouble speaking about her husband's predicament.

She pulled out her cellphone and flipped through her pictures while seated on the couch. She wanted to show a reporter a picture she took of her son's letter to Santa Claus.

In November, at a Macy's Santa-letter display at a nearby mall, the boy wrote out his wish: "Dear Santa: Can you bring my Dad from Sweden pls." He has not seen his father in three years.

"I'm really breaking down, because I don't know what to do," she said. "It's not fair."

The New York Times, AAP

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