Syrian baby dies while waiting for U.S. refugee visa

One morning last summer, his nerves frayed after yet another sleepless night watching his infant son fight to breathe, Abed Hassan showed up to a United Nations refugee office in Jordan and began screaming like a madman.

“Just send us back to Syria if you’re not going to help!” Hassan recalled yelling, speaking via translator Thursday in a phone interview from Amman, Jordan.

It was the desperate last stand of a displaced Syrian father who couldn’t afford urgent heart surgery for his son. And to Hassan’s surprise, the outburst seemed to work. A sympathetic U.N. staff member stopped the officers who were hauling him off and agreed to review the case. The family was soon added to the pipeline for resettlement in the United States, Hassan said, and he was told that the case stood a good chance for fast-tracking because of baby Mohammed’s grave condition.

But the process didn’t move fast enough. On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, just a few days after his first birthday, Mohammed’s heart stopped. His death, in limbo in Jordan, outraged humanitarian workers assigned to the family and showed the human toll of a backlogged, understaffed admissions apparatus that has admitted just 1,175 Syrians in the first five months of the fiscal year. The small sum puts in doubt the Obama administration’s goal of resettling 10,000 Syrians this year.

It’s impossible to know whether Mohammed’s life would’ve been saved had travel to the United States been expedited. What’s clear, according to medical documents and witness statements, is that the boy’s enlarged heart and other serious ailments weren’t being treated in Jordan, where the U.S.-allied monarchy is overwhelmed by more than 600,000 displaced Syrians. Humanitarian agencies and local nonprofits lack the funding to cover expensive procedures.

By the time the family’s case made it to the third round of the notoriously slow U.S. screening system, Mohammed was gone.

“They were looking at the file and said, ‘Someone from your family is missing.’ I said, yes, my son is dead now,” Hassan recalled of that interview with immigration officers. “Over and over they asked about ‘the missing son,’ double checking about what happened to him. Finally, they said, ‘May God rest his soul’ and continued their questions.”

The Hassan family is identified in this news report under pseudonyms because they fear that speaking publicly about their experience could jeopardize their resettlement chances; the family’s case is still in the pipeline. Medical records and immigration papers were provided to McClatchy for review and the family’s story was corroborated by personnel from Oxfam, the international humanitarian organization.

“The just over 1,000 people who’ve been resettled to the U.S. since the beginning of October represent just a tiny fraction of what our country can and should be doing to bring people to safety, and far less than we’ve done in the past,” said Noah Gottschalk, senior humanitarian policy adviser at Oxfam. “With the right resources and funding in place, the U.S. has the capacity and expertise to make the process more efficient so that families like this one don’t have to jump through hoops for years in search of safety.”

A State Department spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity as per the department’s protocol, wasn’t authorized to comment specifically on the family’s case. Speaking generally about the admissions program, the spokesperson said, the system favors “the world’s most vulnerable refugees, including many who suffer from acute medical conditions or who face threats to their safety.”

Each case takes around two years to process, though there are ways to “expedite cases that have very acute needs” without bypassing what the spokesperson called “robust” security and health checks before travel to the United States.

The departments of State and Homeland Security are hoping to speed progress toward the 10,000-Syrian goal by posting additional staff in Jordan, restarting interviews in Beirut and opening an interview center in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil. The spokesperson added, without elaboration, that there was also a “a new pathway” to resettle Syrians who already have relatives living in the United States.

“We deeply regret any situation where tragedy strikes while a family is in the process of being resettled in the United States,” the State Department spokesperson said in an emailed response to a request for comment. “We are firmly committed to continual improvements and refinements to our refugee admissions processes.”

Efforts to scale up admissions face intense political pressure, however, chiefly from Republican lawmakers who, alarmed by the surge in Islamic State extremists’ attacks on Western targets and the December killing of 14 people in San Bernardino by an American-born man and his immigrant Pakistani wife, have sought to stem or even stop the trickle of Syrian refugees to the United States.

Aid workers said the hurdles some lawmakers are floating would effectively halt a process that’s already glacial because refugees are the most extensively screened category of visitor to the United States. Attacks such as Tuesday’s deadly bombings in Belgium only harden anti-refugee rhetoric, even though the only suspects identified publicly were homegrown, not recent arrivals.

“After Paris, San Bernardino, and now Brussels, people are understandably concerned about safety, and security must be the first priority,” concedes Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “But this cannot prevent us from fulfilling our moral obligation to assist innocent individuals fleeing harm from the same monstrous organization responsible for these attacks.”

The State Department spokesperson didn’t address the political threats to the program but said that refugee admissions have a tradition of relying on “strong local support, and we are confident that American communities will continue to open their doors to welcome the world’s most vulnerable, as they have done for generations.”

Joelle Bassoul, an Oxfam worker who followed the family’s plight, wrote a detailed, emotional summary of the case. She wrote that the $14,000 price tag for life-saving surgery for Mohammed was way out of reach for his father, whose monthly income of $310 from illegal work at a café pays for the family’s “single-bedroom flat with a tiny, windowless kitchen and a bathroom teeming with cockroaches.”

When she visited the family, Bassoul wrote, the parents removed the baby’s layers of clothing and urged her to feel his chest.

“Mohammed’s heart pounds furiously and irregularly against my fingers,” she recounted. His tearful mother told Bassoul that, “at night, when everything is silent and we are all asleep, I can hear his heart beating like a wall clock.”

Mohammed died four days after Bassoul’s visit. A mix of helplessness and anger, common among aid workers assigned to the Syrian conflict, surges forth from Bassoul’s account of the death as she writes of “losing a battle that could have been won.”

“For all of them, the choice is: return to Syria and face death, or live in destitution in neighboring countries,” Bassoul wrote. “How many more children like Mohammed will die from preventable deaths if states do not open their doors and extend a merciful hand?”

The Hassan family still hopes to settle in the United States. The four surviving children, who ask daily about Mohammed, suffer from illnesses, vision problems and the effects of trauma. The family fled their native Homs in 2013 after an air strike flattened their house. They traveled briefly to the Syrian capital of Damascus, then to Jordan.

In their latest interview with U.S. authorities, Hassan said, the family was asked to undergo medical examinations and was told, “You’re almost there.”

“If it only happened faster, my son would’ve gotten treatment and he might still be alive,” Hassan said. “All I can think is that it’s not too late for my other kids.”

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 6:55 PM with the headline "Syrian baby dies while waiting for U.S. refugee visa."