On Saturday afternoon, Representative Adriano Espaillat, a Democratic congressman from the Bronx, got a phone call from Gustavo Rivera, who represents the Bronx in the State Senate. Rivera was monitoring the situation at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens, where Customs and Border Protection agents were trying to enforce the executive order that President Donald Trump signed Friday afternoon. The order barred Syrian refugees’ entry to the United States indefinitely, barred all other refugees for 120 days and blocked the entry of all citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries for 90 days. There were at least three detainees at Kennedy’s Terminal 1 whom Rivera said he knew of, all in the third category: the Iranian mother of a U.S. soldier, an Iranian Ph.D. student at New York University and the Yemeni mother of a couple due to be married in New York.
