A Maryland woman says she's fearful of going to see her family in Sierra Leon after President Donald Trump announced a travel ban and restrictions targeting mostly African and Middle Eastern countries.
“Though I grew up here, my heart is in Sierra Leone," said Sonia Staples, a resident of Prince George's County. "It is my heart, okay. It is my heart.”
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WATCH HEREStaples spent the first 14 years of her life in Sierra Leone before moving to the United States.
She said she was preparing to take her two sons on their first trip to her home country this August.
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SIGN UP But that trip is now in jeopardy in light of Trump's restrictions on visitors from seven countries, including Sierra Leon, she said.
“My family will be donating a school to a village. I would love to go, but not knowing what would happen, I wouldn’t want to take my kids and have them stuck over in Sierra Leone because, you know, we couldn’t come back,” Staples said.
Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will also be under heightened restrictions when the policy takes effect on Monday at 12:01 a.m.
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Citizens of 12 other countries are banned from visiting the U.S. Some, but not all, also appeared on the list of banned countries in Trump's first term. The new ban includes Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
Trump said some countries had “deficient” screening and vetting or have historically refused to accept deported citizens or residents who were prone to overstaying their visas in the U.S.
Imam Teslim Alghali with the Sierra Leone Muslim Jamaat mosque in Hyattsville said his congregation was initially focused on mass deportations before Trump entered the White House, but they're now pivoting.
“It’s going to create fear for sure and people are going to go back to the trenches,” Alghali said of the travel ban.
“When people do come to us with that fear as the main thing, we try to calm them down. Caution as to how they should leave and, also, we have resources that we can direct them to."
“We saw it under Trump 1.0 where they kept going back to the Supreme Court and tweaking it based on, you know, the guidance that we they were getting from the Supreme Court,” said Diana Konaté, the deputy executive director of policy and advocacy for African Communities Together.
Konaté said support groups have been preparing for a travel ban.
“We’re going to fight it and we’re going to do whatever we can because we know that ... as immigrants, we add a lot to this country,” she said.
