'Trump Is Speaking About Us Without Seeing Us'

AMMAN, Jordan—The day that President Donald Trump signed an order banning refugees from America for 120 days, Amman was pierced with cold. It snowed for the first time this year, a mute flurry of fog and sleet dropping over the city as its resident Syrian, Iraqi, Sudanese, Somali, and Yemeni refugees flooded Facebook and WhatsApp networks with questions and fear. I got a message on Instagram from Mahmoud, a 20-year-old Syrian and a former student that I hadn’t seen in years: “Hi Alice/I am mahmoud/How are you/I miss you.” A few minutes later, after I asked if he was still in Jordan: “Yes/but my father is in America.”

I went to Zarqa, an industrial city an hour from Amman, where Mahmoud and his mother Um Zuhair live in a Palestinian refugee camp—a place where Palestinians who have been there for 50 years sublet asylum space to Syrians who have been there for five Mahmoud was only 16 when I last saw him, and he has grown tall and gangly, his smile still shy but quicker than before. I found him and Um Zuhair sending frantic messages to Mahmoud’s father Abu Zuhair, who’s been in Texas for one year and is scheduled to receive a green card in April. He was supposed