New American citizen once couldn't return to U.S. because of travel ban

Wednesday morning, the day before Abdulelah Othman was to become a U.S. citizen, he woke from a nightmare he thought was a warning. In his dream, the Selden resident was chased and shot at by two men as he headed to take his citizenship oath.

His wife, Barbara Gundrum, calmed him down.

"You think this was a premonition," she recalled telling her husband. "It wasn't!"

On Thursday, Othman, 45, sat proudly in the federal courthouse in Central Islip waiting for his name to be called to receive his citizenship.

It was a long way from the very real nightmare he and his wife went through in early 2017, when President Donald Trump's travel ban stranded him in Saudi Arabia while he was visiting his ailing mother. 

Even though he had a green card, Othman, a Saudi-born Yemeni citizen, ran into all kinds of resistance getting a flight home to New York. He said he didn't know when he would see his wife again, let alone realize his dream of becoming an American, something he had prayed for since he was 10 years old.

Back in Selden, his wife of 5 years said she was stunned when she heard Trump's executive order banning entry of non-American citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The ban included Yemen, but not Saudi Arabia. Othman's Yemeni passport was causing him all kinds of trouble, he said.

Gundrum, 58, said she became upset as a "billy goat — I couldn't talk, I was shaking." She called her congressman, Lee Zeldin. She called the media and got the story out. She texted her husband with updates.

When the story emerged, the couple received a good bit of nasty comments from people on social media. They also received some heartwarming support. 

"I came to realize this story was bigger than us," she said.

At the time, a federal judge partially blocked the ban, and the Trump administration clarified that it did not include people with green cards that allowed them into the United States.

Three weeks passed before Othman could get on a plane back home, where his wife met him at Kennedy Airport with a big kiss and a box of chocolates.

Othman and Gundrum first met in Saudi Arabia in 2011. He was working as a legal secretary, and she was an American citizen working as a nurse at a hospital where he came for care.

"I was waiting to see the doctor when I saw her in the other room sit down at her computer," Othman recalled. "I thought, 'Oh my God this woman is beautiful.' I looked not with my eyes; I looked with my heart."

He proposed to her on their first coffee date, and she accepted. They married in 2012.

"We've learned to read each other," she said. "He comes from a culture where the men can kind of call the shots. But I'm a New York girl."

Othman applied for U.S. citizenship early this year, and the couple spent months touring sites of America's history. They visited Boston and went on historic walking tours through Philadelphia. There, Othman did the big run up those long stairs, as seen in the movie "Rocky."

All the while she quizzed him on questions he would face on the U.S. citizenship test.

What is the supreme law of the land in the United States?

The Constitution.

Othman passed the test in September. 

On Thursday, he joined more than a hundred people in the courtroom in saying the Pledge of Allegiance, speaking as if with one voice, making it sound like a song.

Othman handed over his green card to a court worker, kissing it first.

Federal Judge Joseph Bianco, donning his black robe, told the multicultural group that they were now citizens of "the most free, the most powerful and the most diverse country in the world." 

Then Othman stepped up and was handed his citizenship certificate, which looked a lot like a college diploma.

Walking out of the court, he took it out of its folder and looked at it for long moments, again and again.

"This is my dream come true," he said.

By Craig Schneider

craig.schneider@newsday.comScraigo

Craig Schneider is a Long Island native and Stony Brook University alumnus. He joined Newsday as a general assignment reporter in January 2018 after 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.