Trump’s Childhood Home In Queens Welcomes Refugees Ahead Of UN General Assembly

Ahead of President Donald Trump hosting his first United Nation’s General Assembly, where he is expected to finalize the number of immigrants that the United States will accept in 2018, the president's childhood home in Queens, New York, temporarily became a shelter for a group of refugees on Saturday.

The home in question is a three-story Tudor-style building built by Trump’s father in 1940 and auctioned off two times in the recent years. The last buyer bought it for $2.14 million in March. It is currently available for rent at Airbnb for $725.

The international anti-poverty organization Oxfam rented the house over the weekend and invited four refugees to share their views about the president’s anti-immigration policies from inside the very house that Trump grew up in.

“We wanted to send a strong message to Trump and world leaders that they must do more to welcome refugees," said Shannon Scribner, acting director for the humanitarian department of Oxfam America, ABC News reported.

Among the refugees who got to spend the night in the house where Trump resided till the age of four, was Eiman Ali, 22, a Muslim refugee. Ali arrived with her parents to the U.S. at the age of three from Yemen. She said that she considered Trump an entertaining character from “Celebrity Apprentice” but her views changed after the president had adopted hard rhetoric against her community.

“To have someone so outspoken against my community become the president of the United States was very eye-opening and hurtful because I have invested a lot in this country," she said.

Ali’s fellow refugee, who shared the house with her – Ghassan al-Chahada, 41 – echoed Ali’s thoughts. Al-Chahada arrived in America with his wife and children in 2012 from Syria, a country from where the U.S. no longer accepts immigrants following a permanent ban placed by Trump.

And now al-Chahada lives in fear of never being able to reenter the country which he now calls home if he ever traveled out of its borders. “I had hopes I would get my green card and be able to visit my country," al-Chahada said. "But since Trump was elected I don't dare, I don't dare leave this country and not be able to come back.”

He urged the president to remember the kind of compassion and mercy that resided in his heart when he was a kid and make his political decisions based on that.

“I would advise him to remember, to think about how he felt when he slept in this bedroom," al-Chahada said. "If he can stay in tune with who he was as a child, the compassion children have and the mercy, I would say he's a great person."

Oxfam America wrote on their website that opening the doors to Trump’s childhood home to refugees was an effort on their part to let the world leaders, as well as people of the U.S., know - “refugees are welcome here.”

“A cornerstone of the founding values of the U.S. was to offer oppressed people refuge from violence and persecution. Now as Americans we must open our minds, hearts, and communities to vulnerable refugees who are seeking a safe place to call home,” their website said.

Just like Oxfam, another non-profit organization, HIAS, which is also determined to protect refugees, has urged people of the U.S. to write to their Members of Congress, urging them to set a Presidential Determination of at least 75,000 refugees for the next fiscal year.