Three years later, Morris remains in the desert kingdom, trapped in a prolonged and painful ordeal highlighting the power her ex-husband and men like him continue to wield over women under guardianship laws.
Soon after they landed in Riyadh, Morris’s ex-husband seized their travel documents and arranged for the girl, eight-year-old Tala, to become a Saudi citizen, ensuring he could bar her from leaving.
That has left Morris effectively stranded, her savings depleted and credit cards maxed out, in a country where she does not speak the language and cannot legally work.
She has been forced to borrow money and food from strangers to scrape by.
“I will not leave without my daughter,” a defiant but tearful Morris, 34, told AFP in a phone interview from the house her ex-husband rents for them in the central city of Buraidah.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has earned plaudits for easing notorious guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia that greatly restricted women’s ability to travel and work.
This month she received a summons from Saudi prosecutors indicating she was under investigation for “disturbing public order”, a development Morris believes is linked to social media posts about her case.
She was informed a few days ago that she had been placed under a travel ban, according to an electronic notice seen by AFP.
The family of Morris’s ex-husband did not respond to requests for comment.
Complex system
AFP spoke to two other American mothers with similar stories. All three described their difficulty in navigating the complex Saudi legal system.
The US embassy in Riyadh told AFP it was following Morris’s case “very closely” and was “in regular contact with Ms Morris and in touch with the Saudi government”.
‘Protecting Saudi children’Â
Out of 150,000 marriages registered in 2020 in Saudi Arabia, some 4,500 were unions involving a Saudi and a foreigner, which require a special permit, according to the Saudi statistics authority.
That same year, authorities recorded 4,200 divorces in Saudi-foreigner marriages.
The Human Rights Commission, a Saudi government body, did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment on Morris’s case and others like it.
Nasreen al-Ghamdi, a Saudi lawyer, described the kingdom’s restrictions on where foreign mothers can take their children as evidence that “the state protects Saudi children to avoid their exposure to problems abroad”.