It is less than a week until Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., and Rolla Alaydi can barely stop crying.
For more than a year, Alaydi, a Palestinian American teacher living in California, has been working nonstop with an attorney in a heartrending, uphill battle to evacuate nearly two dozen of Alaydi’s family members — including small children — who’ve been trapped in Gaza during Israel’s immensely brutal war. Unlike other relatives and friends, these family members have survived, but only barely. Israeli forces bombed their family home, and Alaydi describes them as living in tents as the harsh winter arrives. “They now live in multiple tents, so if something happens, at least they don’t all die together,” she says. As news broke this week of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal, Alaydi messaged Rolling Stone that she received word that one family member had just been shot in the stomach, and she was scrambling to confirm what had happened. (As of Friday, last she heard, her family member is still alive.)
Alaydi adds that she is the only person sending them money, whatever she can, and because Gaza has been so catastrophically pummeled by Israeli forces, with the support of the Biden administration, the family members all financially depend on her. For the past year, she says she wakes up every morning unsure if her family is still alive, until she gets a message or a reply from one of them. Sometimes, there have been days when she can’t reach them.
“I just feel paralyzed,” she tells Rolling Stone, fighting back tears and at times wailing. “I keep fearing that if I have panic attacks and go to sleep and never wake up, who will help my family? I can’t die; they all need me! I need to be not selfish, and keep going. I promised them all I would get them here, but it’s been so hard and it’s difficult to find hope … I’m not asking for too much, I just want them to live, that’s all.”
Under President Joe Biden, it has been enormously difficult for American citizens trying to rescue children or other family members — even those who are U.S. citizens or green card holders — from the carnage in Gaza, and bring them to the United States. Even if this new cease-fire deal holds and the bombing stops, Alaydi’s family, just like so many others like them, will still be in a living hell, in a destroyed Gaza, and seeking potential ways out.
As painfully slow and hyper-selective as the Biden administration has been — including on humanitarian parole applications and medical evacuees — multiple immigration attorneys, human rights advocates, and Muslim-American activists say that there has been some occasional room to negotiate here and there, and that they have managed to get some children and others out alive. Some have made it all the way to American soil on temporary status. Others languish in Cairo, Egypt, awaiting final approval to reunite with family in the U.S.
Now, with President-elect Trump returning to power on Monday, those tiny ounces of hope are expected to be entirely, aggressively snuffed out — at least for the next four years. And many of those children and families will remain trapped or in limbo overseas, with an even less sympathetic American government dictating their fates. Various immigration lawyers and Muslim-American advocates — as deeply enraged as they are at the Biden administration — were hoping for another four years of runway under a Kamala Harris presidency, in which there would have likely been scant but visible opportunities for pressuring the government into aiding the reunification of Palestinian families.
Those faintest of hopes were all but obliterated in early November, when former President Trump defeated Vice President Harris in the U.S. presidential election. While Trump managed to win the majority-Arab city of Dearborn, Michigan, he openly campaigned on expanding his infamous travel “Muslim ban,” and as recently as September promised to bar “refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.” Last year, Trump was also publicly using the word “Palestinian” as a slur.
“We’re not going to have family reunification with the new Trump administration,” says Houston-based human rights attorney Maria Kari, who has taken on many cases pro bono, including that of the Alaydi family. “Even my preliminarily approved Palestinian clients who have gotten so close, they’re just going to be sitting in a third-party country… When it comes to getting their relatives out now, I’m not telling any of these people to waste their time and money filing applications for humanitarian parole, not with the new administration coming in.”
Kari adds that the trouble “isn’t just one large executive order,” such as Trump’s travel “Muslim ban,” which he has repeatedly vowed to revive and expand when back in office, “or the big things that get taken to court.” She continues: “It’s these small, little things that the average public doesn’t even know about. Last time, it was death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts — tiny policy [and] legal changes. It would be like dragging out eight-month periods for work permits but then not actually giving them their work permits, or saying their contract with the printer had run out. Trump does these things, and then some real geniuses come up with ways to make it extremely difficult for us [attorneys and advocates] to operate.”
As horrific and demoralizing as the past year has been during a Democratic presidency, Alaydi has long contemplated whether her mission to extract family from Gaza could get even harder under a revived Trump administration. Alaydi shared with Rolling Stone screenshots of messages she exchanged with her Gaza relatives just after Trump’s 2024 election-night victory in November, expressing fear and uncertainty about what this will mean for their family. Around that time, her family had also texted her a photo showing that they were down to eating just plain bread in their tents.
Alaydi shared with Rolling Stone several photos, taken in recent months of Gaza’s “hell on earth,” of her five-year-old niece, Alma. Despite all the destruction and mass death around her, Alma is smiling in some of the photos, in pigtails, wearing an oversized red sweater that reads, “LOVE.” In other pictures, it’s impossible to not see the dread and misery in her eyes.
In a phone interview, Alaydi discusses her conversations with Alma during this war, which started in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and hostage-taking in Israel. After not too long, Alaydi, understandably, cannot contain her tears and says she has to “go for a walk and have a deep breath.” Alaydi says that her niece dreams of growing up to become a doctor. The Palestinian child says she also dreams of the day she can go back to school, even though, Alma says, she’s heard all her friends have been killed. She loves to color and also enjoys making necklaces and bracelets for other small children just like her. When Alma tells her aunt that she’s cold, Alaydi sobs, because she “can’t even send her a freaking jacket” in the mail.
“I have promised her, ‘I’m getting you out,’” Alaydi says. “I’ve told her, ’When you come to the U.S., I’m going to buy a box of new colorful beads for you… so you can make your necklaces for young girls.’ When she talks about what she looks forward to doing in America, it’s nothing special, just like how she can’t wait to eat a hamburger — because she says she misses meat so much because they haven’t had any for so long. And I’ve promised her I’d get her hamburgers. She is so strong and so sweet. I don’t want to fail her, but I don’t know what to do.”
Asked what she would say if Trump or incoming Vice President J.D. Vance were sitting in front of her right now, Alaydi responds: “I would show them a photo of Alma, and ask them: ‘What if it were your niece?’ We aren’t terrorists. We are human beings.”
Theirs is a story of just one family.
But their story is similar to countless other Gaza civilians and children, Muslim or not, whose lives have been immeasurably ripped apart, and whose already slim odds of escape are on the chopping block, with Trump set to commence his immigration and refugee crackdowns.
Since early last year, immigration and human rights lawyers — who were working on behalf of U.S. citizens and residents who sought to get family over to the states from Gaza and certain Muslim-majority nations — have told Rolling Stone that they’d had numerous frank conversations with clients and colleagues about how they were now in a race against the clock. Even before Trump secured the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he was on a clear march toward winning the primary and other polling suggested he had a strong chance of returning to the Oval Office. And he was campaigning on rebooting and growing his first term’s “Muslim ban.”
As terrible as the Biden administration had been on these issues, the attorneys advised their clients, the clampdown would be much crueler and harsher under President Trump.
“It was like a sprint to get every person in who we could,” one of these lawyers says. “It is a tragedy how few families we’ve been able to reunite in America.”
In the past several months, Rolling Stone spoke to a number of Muslim families who could be affected. Several did not want to be named, out of fear of being put on a “list” or a “watchlist” of some kind by the incoming Trump administration. One of the women Rolling Stone spoke to has her own children still trapped abroad, after a protracted process that began under President Biden — to get her kids out of Gaza and to the U.S. after the war began — has kept the children in Egypt. Now with Trump retaking the White House, it’s unclear if the meager progress she’s made will be quickly reversed.
If, or when, Trump reimposes the travel ban that President Biden rolled back on day one of his administration, part of the official justification underlying this policy shift will be a secret 17-page Department of Homeland Security report. When the first version of the Muslim ban was taken to court as bigoted and blatantly unconstitutional, the first Trump administration argued before the Supreme Court that ban was based not on mere bigotry, but on national-security-related concerns pertaining to the affected countries. The first Trump administration told the court these concerns were outlined in the secret DHS document.
To many outside observers and experts, this reeked of obvious bad faith. But the Supreme Court majority bought it, taking the Trump administration at its word, and ultimately rubber-stamped a revised version of Trump’s sweeping ban. The first Trump administration fought to keep this alleged document hidden from the public. The Biden administration — as if to follow its pattern established on so much else — dragged its feet on demands to release it.
“The administration spent more than half of Biden’s presidency not giving it to us, with dog-ate-my-homework type excuses. Initially, years ago, they said they had to go through hundreds of thousands of pages to find it,” says David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, which filed a lawsuit to try to force the Biden administration to finally cough it up.
“Now,” Bier adds, “as recently as within the past couple weeks, the Biden [Justice Department] is still telling us they’re not releasing it to the public before the end of his term.”
There are only two days left until Trump is sworn into office again, after he ran for two years on a policy platform that is somehow even more flamboyantly authoritarian and crackdown-obsessed than his 2016 and 2020 platforms.
For human rights attorneys such as Maria Kari, there is so much to fear and loathe about the coming Trump era, and not just on the issues related to immigration and Palestinians. But for this weekend, at least, we are still in the Biden era. And there are some images from Biden’s America that Kari says will be forever carved into her memory.
“I’ve visited with some of the children in Houston, [Texas], who have been brought here from Gaza for medical treatment,” she says. “I’m a mother and I don’t know how many diapers you’ve changed. But until this war, I had never seen someone have to change a diaper on a baby — who was just under two years old — who had third-degree burns on the diaper-change area. The sound the baby makes is horrifying. It’s seared into your brain. It haunts you forever. I’ve sat and ate with a girl who had to hold her jaw while we ate because there’s a hole in her jaw and food was falling out while she ate. I’ve sat and painted ceramic dinosaurs with these children — the same things I do with my children — and they’re so beautiful, they’re so cute and resilient. One of them had just buried her baby sister just before she got on a plane to come here.”
The lawyer continues: “No matter how bad things are going to get under the incoming Trump administration, to me, that is the legacy of President Biden and his administration.”
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