NEW YORK \u2014 With protesters\u2019 chants echoing through arrival halls, confusion prevailed Sunday at airports across the United States amid seemingly contradictory signals from the Trump administration over a hotly contested executive order blocking U. S. entry to refugees and nationals of seven Muslim-majority nations.
Advocacy groups and administration officials remained on an apparent collision course over the order, which since its signing on Friday has led to the detention of more than 100 people landing at airports across the country with valid entry documents.
About twice as many others were denied permission to board flights to the United States, according to lawyers representing a consortium of groups that won a temporary nationwide stay Saturday night against the deportation of anyone who had arrived with a valid visa.
Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union said they would ultimately press to have Trump\u2019s order overturned as unconstitutional. In the meantime, the emergency stay issued by a federal judge in Brooklyn represented an \u201cabsolute baseline\u201d prohibiting the removal of any of those who were stopped upon arrival, said Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU\u2019s Immigrants\u2019 Rights Project.
But it remained essentially the luck of the draw in terms of who was stopped, who was released after questioning, and who had access to legal counsel if they were detained, the lawyers said.
\u201cThere\u2019s no method to this madness,\u201d said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, another of the groups that filed the legal challenge in New York.
For some, the directive\u2019s second full day brought a reprise of anxiety and heartbreak from the day before. Hind Mohamed traveled to Kennedy Airport from New Jersey with her family, hoping to greet her mother, a green-card holder traveling from Sudan who had been due to arrive Saturday. But her initial flight was delayed, and then she was rerouted to Saudi Arabia.
Her mother\u2019s flight from Riyadh had been on the ground an hour, but there was no immediate sign of her. \u201cI\u2019m just nervous,\u201d Mohamed said.
Her son, Awab Hassan, kept a close eye out for his grandmother; he offered a teen\u2019s unvarnished take on the executive order, saying it lumped together terrorists and innocent people.
\u201cThat\u2019s not justice \u2014 to see this country devolve, I\u2019m not proud of that,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere\u2019s the feeling of taking people in, sharing the American Dream? Instead of shoving them back into a life of insecurity?\u201d
In some cases, customs and border officials were taking it upon themselves to ignore judges\u2019 rulings, lawyers and some local officials said. International airports at San Francisco and Washington Dulles were reported to be denying access to the lawyers who offered free services.
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer spent the early hours of Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport, but said he was repeatedly denied access to detainees and was unable to get an official count of those who had been stopped on entry.
In Chicago, there was said to be greater leniency in releasing those initially detained, and in Boston, where a judge\u2019s order appeared to guarantee landing rights to anyone with a valid visa during the coming week, legal observers were watching for an increase in arrivals.
As anguish mounted among families uncertain of loved ones\u2019 fate, the Trump administration insisted that enforcement of the president\u2019s directive would be unaffected by a flurry of court rulings temporarily forbidding deportation of those who arrived with valid visas.
\u201cProhibited travel will remain prohibited,\u201d the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, adding that the government retains the right to revoke visas on national-security grounds. The directive blocked all refugee arrivals for 120 days \u2014 refugees from Syria are blocked indefinitely \u2014 and suspended entry by people holding passports from Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
But White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, appeared to walk back a major element of the order, which initially stopped the usual automatic U. S. entry normally given to heavily vetted permanent U. S. residents \u2014green-card holders \u2014 from the seven affected countries.
\u201cAs far as green-card holders, moving forward, it doesn\u2019t affect them,\u201d Priebus said on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press.\u201d It was not clear whether he was referring to green-card holders being permitted to remain in the country, and re-enter after travel if they passed additional security screening.
A day after House Speaker Paul Ryan was one of relatively few Republicans to voice an active defense, two Senate Republican heavyweights \u2014 Arizona\u2019s John McCain and South Carolina\u2019s Lindsey Graham \u2014 weighed in with a strongly worded joint statement warning against a \u201cself-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism.\u201d
\u201cIt is clear from the confusion at airports across our nation that President Trump\u2019s executive order was not properly vetted,\u201d the statement said, in a pointed reference to Trump\u2019s repeated contention that despite a rigorous existing security process, arrivals until now have not been properly \u201cvetted.\u201d
\u201cOur government has a responsibility to defend our borders, but we must do so in a way that makes us safer and upholds all that is decent and exceptional about our nation,\u201d they said.
Trump weighed in with a Sunday morning Twitter post saying the U. S. needs \u201cstrong borders and extreme vetting, NOW.\u201d The President also decried what he called a \u201chorrible mess\u201d regarding immigration in other parts of the world, including Europe.
European leaders have expressed shock and dismay over Trump\u2019s directive, and some U. S. allies were taken aback by the blocked entry of their own nationals with dual passports from one of the affected countries in the presidential order. British news reports said Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had been instructed to ask the Trump administration for an exemption from the travel ban for British citizens, even if they were natives of one of the affected countries.
Immigration advocates and the Trump administration offered clashing narratives as to the first full day\u2019s rollout of the executive directive. The Department of Homeland Security said fewer than 1 percent of international arriving travelers on Saturday had been \u201cinconvenienced\u201d by the president\u2019s directive.
Lawyers countered that some enforcement went far beyond national security considerations, citing the blocked entry of a 2-year-old U. S. citizen with parents who held green cards; an Iranian Fulbright scholar who was forced onto a flight home before it was turned around on the tarmac; and an active-duty U. S. military officer whose arriving elderly mother was detained.
\u201cA lot of people are being handcuffed, and people who don\u2019t speak English well are being coerced into taking voluntary departure,\u201d said lawyer Heller.
But some travel sagas ended in joy and relief.
Stella Ava of Cleveland, a Syrian-born green-card holder, was visiting relatives in Turkey when the executive order took effect.
She feared being prevented from boarding her flight or detained upon arrival at New York\u2019s John F. Kennedy International Airport, but told her waiting husband she had sailed through border controls after a few perfunctory-seeming questions.
\u201cThank God,\u201d she said, and tightly hugged her children. \u201cI was so worried.\u201d<\/p>\n

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