A Washington Correspondent’s Own Refugee Experience
President Trump’s executive order last Friday suspended the overseas refugee program for four months. What are the humanitarian impacts of barring admission for refugees who have waited years to come lawfully to the United States? And who are refugees? Helene Cooper writes powerfully of the tragic experiences of her family of refugees from Liberia in the Washington Post:
“When I was 13 years old, my family fled our home for the United States.
We were refugees, even though we came here on visitor visas that we simply outstayed. The country of my birth, Liberia, had just seen a military coup, where enlisted soldiers took over the government, disemboweled the president and launched an orgy of retribution against the old guard. My father was shot. My cousin was executed on the beach by firing squad. My mom was gang-raped by soldiers in the basement of our house after she volunteered to submit to them on the condition that they leave my sisters and me, ages 8 to 16, alone.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WASHINGTON POST. The writer, Helene Cooper, left, with her mother and her sister in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1972.
KJ