Farah doesn’t know me. I was just one of 100 people who gathered at San Francisco International Airport when she arrived last year. I work for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and we had invited the media to cover her story. HEAL Palestine, a humanitarian nonprofit, had arranged for her medical treatment in the Bay Area after she lost her eye and leg in an Israeli bombing in Gaza.
Now, the State Department has announced it is blocking new visas for Palestinians from Gaza. On X, the department stated: “All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days.”
In plain terms, this means slamming the door on children like Farah and others I’ve seen arrive in the Bay Area. Ahmed came through San Francisco carrying his own war injuries and trauma, clinging to the hope that here, at least, he could heal. Just weeks ago, three more children made it through: Layan, 14, burned and struck by shrapnel when her school was bombed. Anas, 8, who lost his father in an airstrike that crushed his leg. Ghazal, 6, wounded when an Israeli bomb exploded while her family was displaced in Rafah.
These are the children that Laura Loomer and Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) call “terrorists.” Loomer posted videos of some of the most recent arrivals and demanded that the State Department ban entry to “Islamic invaders.” That’s not just cruelty—it’s Islamophobia, plain and simple.
The same government that funds and arms Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is now moving to stop even the few wounded children who might otherwise reach safety and care.
And it worked. The State Department’s move to stop visas for Gazans echoes the same fearmongering behind US President Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban. This is Muslim Ban 2.0: treating every Palestinian from Gaza as a threat, as if even wounded children were anything other than victims of Israeli genocide.
That is what dehumanization looks like: You stop seeing children as children. You don’t see the burns on their skin, the missing limbs, the trauma etched into their faces. You don’t see the mothers and fathers carrying them through bombed-out streets, desperate just to keep them alive.
The same government that funds and arms Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is now moving to stop even the few wounded children who might otherwise reach safety and care. The cruelty is staggering.
When Layan, Anas, and Ghazal arrived at the San Francisco airport, I saw Farah again—this time with her prosthetic eye and leg. She cried as she welcomed the newcomers.
These children are our shared responsibility, and to deny that is to deny our own humanity. James Baldwin understood this truth when he wrote: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
