Toddler whose Yemeni mother fought for a visa to visit him dies at age 2

Toddler whose Yemeni mother fought for a visa to visit him dies at age 2
(Image credit: CNN/Screenshot)

A terminally ill toddler named Abdullah Hassan died Friday at a hospital in California. He was just 2 years old.

Hassan's story came to national attention because his mother, Shaima Swileh, was denied a visa to travel from Yemen to visit him in his final days. The boy and his father, Ali Hassan, both held American citizenship, but the Yemeni Swileh was unable to join them in the States because Yemen is among the eight nations listed in the Trump administration's revised travel ban.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.