Luol Deng on Trump travel ban: 'I don't think a lot of people know' what refugees go through
After Tuesday night’s win over the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Lakers forward Luol Deng spoke to reporters for the first time since President Donald Trump signed an executive order that indefinitely barred Syrian refugees from entering the United States, suspended the admission of any refugees for 120 days and sharply restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — for 90 days, sparking massive protests at airports across the country.
Deng, a “proud refugee” whose family fled Sudan for Egypt in 1989 after his father was jailed during a violent coup, expressed empathy for those refugees prevented from entering the U.S. over the weekend, painting a picture of those impacted by the ban not as the “bad people (with bad intentions)” hypothesized by the president, but rather as people trying to make the best of the horrific circumstance of being driven from their places of birth:
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From Tania Ganguli of the Los Angeles Times:
“We’ve never really asked to leave my homeland, and a lot of these people go through a lot of things that they have no control of,” Deng said. “To really to see a light at the end of the tunnel and to go towards that light and then that light is turned off is very difficult, not just individually, for the family.
“I remember when I was a kid as a refugee in Egypt every day there was always a hope that we get to leave tomorrow or get to go somewhere. Never knew where, we just wanted somewhere where we wanted an opportunity to make something out of it, and that opportunity came five years later. Now I’m thankful for growing up in Egypt and I’ve learned a lot. But at the same time, I know what it feels like to wait for that opportunity to come every day.”
Deng and his eight siblings fled Sudan for Egypt in 1989 after his father, Sudanese government official Aldo Deng, “was jailed […] during a violent coup by Muslim rebels who imposed Sharia law,” as Michael Wallace detailed in a February 2015 ESPN.com feature:
Released after three months, Aldo and his wife Martha put their children on a plane to sneak to Egypt under the care of the eldest siblings, who would work and live as refugees. Luol’s memory is sketchy from those moments at age 4, but he’s heard stories of everyone “waking up at night and leaving all of our belongings behind to get onto a plane, hoping and praying they wouldn’t figure out who our father was.”
Aldo and Martha then escaped to Europe seeking asylum — a search that ultimately separated the Deng family for five years, connected only by the struggle they endured a continent apart. […] After moving from Sudan to Egypt for five years, Deng and his siblings were reunited with their parents in South London, where Aldo Deng’s petition for asylum was granted in 1993.
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That lengthy wait for asylum in the United Kingdom — the result of the sort of extensive background checks and rigorous vetting to which all refugees must submit to gain entry to the United States — gives Deng a very different perspective on what refugees go through than those who have never experienced the process.
“I don’t think a lot of people know” what applicants have to go through to gain refugee status, Deng said. “It’s not something that’s out there, that’s something that you hear about every day, so I don’t blame people for that. It’s just, for me, I understand it because I went through it. People around me know it because we speak about it, and we do talk about it.
“At the same time, I do understand when you’re told something that’s not true, and you’re told to believe other things, I understand the fear and your reaction coming out of it. If somebody told me a story, and that’s all I know, I’d probably react to what I’m hearing. Whether it’s putting things out there, to let people know — I don’t know what the solution is to it. But a lot of people that do support this are supporting it because of what they believe. What they hear and what they believe.”
That includes the belief that preventing refugees from entering the country will prevent terrorist attacks on American soil.
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White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer earlier this week defended the president’s executive order by saying the U.S. has “to make sure that we do this right” when considering whether or not to let immigrants into the country.
“I don’t think you have to look any farther than the families of [those harmed in the 2013] Boston Marathon [bombing], in [the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in] Atlanta, in [the 2015 shooting attack in] San Bernardino, to ask if we can go further,” he said.
As the Boston Globe noted, “None of the perpetrators of those terror attacks would have been affected by the executive order Trump signed [last] Friday.” According to the Washington Post, the alleged perpetrators of the “10 fatal attacks related to Islamist extremist ideology or deemed international terrorism [that] have occurred in the United States” since Sept. 11, 2001, were all born in countries other than the seven nations covered by the travel ban, and were all either born in the U.S. or entered the country through legal channels such as visas and green cards.
“Since 2001, 82 percent of fatal attacks in the United States from Sunni extremist terrorism, violent Islamic extremists, have been legal permanent residents or citizens. And the others weren’t from these seven countries,” Michael Leiter, who directed the National Counterterrorism Center from 2007 to 2011, told PBS on Tuesday. “So, by shutting down, at least temporarily, immigration from these countries, it’s a little bit like closing the barn door, but it’s not even the barn door where the horse came from.”
Deng made clear Tuesday night that he doesn’t typically like to get involved with politics.
“Once you get into that, sometimes people don’t like your opinion,” he said.
In speaking on this particular topic, though, the 13-year veteran felt it was important to move from opinion onto firmer ground.
“If you really want to look into that, you’ve got to go into facts and what is true and what is not,” he said, according to Ganguli. “I mean, from what I understand, I haven’t seen a lot of refugees committing terrorist acts in this country.”
After several days of confusion as to how the new executive order would be implemented and whom it would affect, U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that dual nationals from one of the seven banned countries will be “treated according to the travel document they present.” Deng and Milwaukee Bucks rookie Thon Maker — both of whom were born in the city of Wau, which was part of Sudan, which is on the list, but is now part of an independent South Sudan, which is not on the list — would then likely not be impacted by the ban, since they travel on U.K. and Australian passports, respectively.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
