{"id":169,"date":"2009-04-01T05:43:31","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T05:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucefinley.com\/refugees\/palestinian-fully-calls-us-home\/"},"modified":"2009-04-01T05:43:31","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T05:43:31","slug":"palestinian-fully-calls-us-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/refugees\/palestinian-fully-calls-us-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestinian fully calls U.S. home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><span id=\"redesign_default\">A blind immigrant wins his five-year battle to become a citizen.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A five-year fight for citizenship ended with a closed, five-minute swearing-in ceremony Tuesday for Palestinian refugee Zuhair Mahd. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, known for routinely conducting mass swearing-in ceremonies of new citizens in downtown Denver, excluded the media for the brief presentation of a certificate of naturalization to Mahd. Some of Mahd&#8217;s family and friends attended. &#8220;It&#8217;s over,&#8221; Mahd, 35, said on the windy steps outside the USCIS building, waving a U.S. flag. &#8220;Someone asked me, &#8216;Why do you even want to be a citizen after all this?&#8217; In my mind, this is a country with good people that get up every morning to do the right thing \u2014 just to be good people. I wanted to be part of that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.denverpost.com\/ci_12041237\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A blind immigrant wins his five-year battle to become a citizen. A five-year fight for citizenship ended with a closed, five-minute swearing-in ceremony Tuesday for Palestinian refugee Zuhair Mahd. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, known for routinely conducting mass swearing-in ceremonies of new citizens in downtown Denver, excluded the media for the brief presentation [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigrants","category-refugees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucefinley.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}