To Protect Children From Trump Border Policy, Canadian Youth Refugee Choir Cancels US Performance
Source: Common Dreams
Published on Friday, June 29, 2018
by Common Dreams
"What if our Kurdish children or children with hijabs got stopped at the border? That's not something we wanted to risk."
by Julia Conley, staff writer
Citing President Donald Trump's Muslim ban which was upheld this week by the U.S. Supreme Court, a Syrian children's choir based in Canada canceled its plans to sing at an international festival in Washington, D.C.
"I can't imagine that we could go if one of [the singers] got turned away at the border," Fei Tang, the founder of the choral group, told the Middle East Eye.
The Nai Syrian Children's Choir was established in 2016 to provide "a unique space for refugee children to learn to express their grief, yearning, love, and hope through singing in their mother tongue and in the official languages of their new home." Young refugees from countries including Yemen, Eritrea, and Tunisia have participated in the group, and its current singers are all Syrian refugees from the ages of five to 15, according to The Guardian.
The choir was invited last October to sing at the Serenade! Choral Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. this week, but canceled its planned performance as the Supreme Court weighed President Donald Trump's restriction on travel from several predominently Muslim nations including Syria. The ban was upheld this week in a 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court.
Read more: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/29/protect-children-trump-border-policy-canadian-youth-refugee-choir-cancels-us
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