They're the refugees that Trump tried to stop. But now they're here, and they're 'becoming Americans

GRAPEVINE, Tex. — On the day that President Trump slashed refugee admissions to their lowest level in four decades, the arrival of a dazed traveler at Dallas’s international airport last month offered a quiet rebuke.

The newcomer was walking the final steps of an improbable 15,000-mile odyssey. There to greet him were four others who had followed the same epic path to an American life, along with a native-born citizen clutching a hand-drawn, red-and-blue sign: “Welcome to Texas!”

None would have been there had Trump had his way.

In a nearly three-year campaign that has encompassed walls, travel bans and the forced separation of children from their parents, the Trump administration has reshaped vast tracts of the U.S. government’s approach toward refugees and immigration.

But in one of his first attempts to bend policy to his will — an effort to block the arrival of refugees who had been detained by the Australian government on remote South Pacific islands — Trump lost.

“I guarantee you they are bad,” the president said during a testy exchange with the Australian prime minister a week after his inauguration. “That is why they are in prison.”

Now more than 600 of them are in the United States, living freely from California to Georgia and dozens of places in between.

After enduring years locked up by Australia for seeking asylum, they are making the most of their second chance — finding jobs, honing their English and putting down roots in a country half a world away from the one they had intended to reach.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/theyre-the-refugees-that-trump-tried-to-stop-but-now-theyre-here-and-theyre-becoming-americans/2019/10/12/7dd7a00e-e6d4-11e9-b7da-053c79b03db8_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1