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Immigrants Anxious to Take Citizenship Test Following Trump's Orders

By Eddie Small | February 1, 2017 3:16pm
 Students at the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights attended a citizenship class on Monday night.
Students at the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights attended a citizenship class on Monday night.
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DNAinfo/Eddie Small

INWOOD — Nigerian immigrant Chioma Okowu had been hoping to take a trip back to her native country soon to visit family members still living there.

That was before President Donald Trump's executive order on Jan. 27 led to green card holders like her getting detained at airports.

Even though Okowu, 27, who came to this country in 2012, is not from one of the seven countries where legal permanent residents were temporarily blocked from coming back to the United States, she has since decided to play it safe and call off the trip.

"Since I’ve been working, I haven’t taken a vacation. I was hoping I was going to take a vacation soon, just for two weeks, and come back," she said. "But with all the things that are going on, I decided to cancel."

Okowu, a home health aid, is currently taking classes with the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights to prepare for her citizenship exam — something she said has taken on a new sense of urgency since Trump took office.

"When you have citizenship, you don’t worry about all this stuff," she said.

She was one of about 11 students who showed up to instructor Christine L. Mendoza's class in Inwood Monday evening, where they packed into a small classroom to learn about early American history, practice writing sentences about the country with proper grammar ("Thanksgiving is in November."), and answer other questions they may face on the test.

Questions the students discussed covered a wide array of topics, ranging from if they ever had an order of nobility in a foreign country to whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party.

"What is the Communist Party?" Mendoza asked the class.

"It is not good for democracy and not good for citizens," replied Mahmudul Osamni, a student from Bangladesh. 

"Don't say good or bad. Just tell them what it is. What is it?" Mendoza responded.

"It is bad," he said.

Mendoza took Osamni's response with good humor, in keeping with the overall lighthearted mood of the class, but she said many students had been attending with a new sense of anxiety since Trump became president.

"They feel more of an urgency now to apply," the instructor said, "because they don’t know if he's going to change it."

Students worry that the price of applying for citizenship could increase and that it could become harder for them to petition for their family members still living in other countries to join them in the United States, Mendoza explained.

However, she still tries to set a positive and upbeat tone in the class, as she wants to make sure her students feel empowered rather than helpless about the process of applying.

"They're happy. They struggled to come here, and now they're living the dream, and the dream is to become a citizen, and I think they're almost there, and they're excited about that," Mendoza said.

"And at the same time nervous, because it could be taken away like that."

Emely Calderon, a 28-year-old hairstylist who lives in The Bronx and came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 2009, said she is eager to become a citizen and start enjoying the added benefits, namely the ability to travel more freely to and from her home country.

President Trump has been on her mind during the process, as she believes becoming a citizen could help her avoid running into problems with his administration.

"If I have citizenship, I don’t have problems with Trump," she said, "because he has a lot of problems with Hispanic people."