Between the in-person interviews, I know that the officials handling my application were looking for anything, anything at all, that could disqualify me for resettlement. And when they thought they found something, they wouldn’t hesitate to follow up. A month after my second interview, I received a phone call out of the blue. The resettlement agency asked me about a field hospital I worked in for seven months, after we first arrived in Turkey. Did I know who owned it? Does he work with a jihadist group? Whose donations are funding this hospital? I told them I knew little – I was just working there, helping out. Their probing continued for half an hour.
By this point, my family had an online file. We could check the status of our application online, and we did check every day.
A few weeks after I received the phone call, our status was updated: The International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) had accepted our application for settlement in the United States. This did not mean the United States was accepting us as refugees; it just meant that the ICMC, which is a federally funded Resettlement Support Center, had accepted our application for consideration. There was no guarantee our application would succeed, and the American vetting process was just beginning.
Next we were on our way to Istanbul, a 15-hour bus ride from Antakya. The ICMC center we walked into felt like an embassy; beyond multiple security checkpoints was a flurry of activity, and the reception area was full of refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, waiting for their chance at a new life.
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