A refugee living in southern Maine, who came to the United States after fleeing famine, civil war and genocide in Sudan and went on to serve his adopted home as a soldier deployed to Iraq, says he will be voting for Donald Trump.
On Thursday, many leaders in Maine’s immigrant community blasted the Republican presidential candidate for demanding that the United States stop admitting people from “dangerous places in the world” during a Portland rally, adding to a long list of Trump’s divisive anti-immigrant proposals that include building a wall along the Mexican border and banning Muslims from entering the country.
But Kwan Malwal, chairman of the South Sudanese Community Association of Maine, told BDN Portland that he’s a Trump fan.
“I’m a big supporter and I will vote for him,” Malwal said Thursday evening.
Malwal said that he’s been won over by the direct way that Trump talks about controversial issues. And while others, including members of Trump’s own party, have condemned his proposals to tighten America’s borders as bigoted and running in the face of the country’s founding principles, Malwal is persuaded that the country’s problems can only be solved by a president who will talk plainly about the challenges facing the nation.
“I see Donald as someone who is not afraid to talk about anything,” he said. “He’ll talk about race. He’ll talk about religion.”
Malwal came to the United States as a Sudanese refugee who spoke nearly no English. He was fleeing the decades-long civil war — Sudan’s second — between the country’s central government and the southern guerrilla movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The conflict displaced more than 4 million Sudanese, killed roughly 2 million and saw one of the highest counts of civilian casualties since World War II.
The bloody conflict is partially attributed to the Muslim central government’s effort to impose Sharia law on the minority population of Christians and and animists, who mostly lived in the country’s south, where Malwal is from. But it was also driven by government corruption, disputes over oil resources and social divisions created during British colonial rule.
Malwal left his home in Sudan for Egypt and then in 2002 came to the United States, where he mastered English, became a citizen and enlisted in the United States Army. He was deployed to Iraq and served as a translator, rising to the rank of sergeant. After he returned from the war, Malwal settled in Portland and recently moved to Saco, but his mother is still in the now-independent South Sudan, which is embroiled in its own civil war.
As a veteran of the Iraq war, Malwal said he does not feel disrespected by the hostile exchanges between Donald Trump and Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in combat in Iraq. And he believes that many of Trump’s more radical proposals, such as building a wall along the Mexican border, could simply never come to pass.
“Just because of what Donald Trump has said, we’re assuming that the whole Homeland Security system would change,” he said, pointing to how the separation of powers in American government stymied some of President Barack Obama’s efforts to change the immigration system.
It is partially his experience in a refugee camp in Egypt that colored Malwal’s thinking about immigration. After seeing other refugees’ applications for asylum in the United States rejected, he said Trump’s proposals don’t seem so different from the status quo.
Malwal would like to see reforms made to America’s immigration system and does not believe, as some in Maine’s immigrant community do, that he would face any difficulty if Trump were elected.
“No, no, no. I think I’m entitled to be here,” he said “I don’t think he’s going to deport someone like myself who served [in the Army] with honor.”
But other African immigrants to Maine were deeply disturbed by Trump’s approach to immigration and suggestion that refugees are a danger. Mahmoud Hassan, a leader in Maine’s Somali community, which the Republican candidate singled out, said that Trump’s rhetoric was deceitful and amounted to scapegoating immigrants and Muslims, many of whom have fled terrorism.
“It is damaging to the psyche of our youth to hear a major party presidential nominee condemn our culture and religion, especially while standing next to the governor of our state,” Hassan said in a statement.
Malwal, who is Catholic, said he did not attend Thursday’s Trump rally and said that the candidate’s “generalization” of Maine’s Somali community is inaccurate and something he disagrees with.
But Malwal also said he admires things about Trump. And asked whether he is worried that the election of the Republican candidate — who on Thursday said that America “has to stop” immigration from “among the most dangerous places in the world — might make it more difficult for his mother to escape South Sudan to the United States, Malwal again expressed little concern.
“I don’t think Donald Trump would affect my mother’s paper processing,” he said.