[ A HuffPost investigation found hundreds of immigration cases
where the ban irrevocably affected life--and death.]
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TRUMP'S TRAVEL BAN FOREVER CHANGED THE LIVES OF MUSLIMS AROUND THE
WORLD  
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Rowaida Abdelaziz
January 26, 2022
HuffPost
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_ A HuffPost investigation found hundreds of immigration cases where
the ban irrevocably affected life--and death. _

Mohammed Saleh talks with HuffPost reporter Rowaida Abdelaziz in
Queens, New York, on Dec. 3, 2021. , Photography by Amr Alfik,
HuffPost

 

Mohammed Saleh never got a chance to say goodbye to his son.

In 2018, Saleh petitioned for a visa so his son — Ayman, who lived
in Aden, Yemen, and was 20 at the time — could come to the United
States to seek treatment for a congenital heart condition. He wanted
to hold Ayman, take him to his doctor appointments, and give him a
chance at life. That opportunity didn’t exist in Yemen, where less
than half of all health facilities were functioning after years of
civil war.

The last time Saleh saw his son was during a visit to Yemen in June
2019. He still hoped then they could reunite in New York, where Saleh
has lived for nearly three decades.

But then-President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several
Muslim-majority countries, issued in January 2017, meant Ayman’s
visa application was delayed indefinitely. Saleh begged lawyers and
advocates for help, but the ban made legal recourse all but
impossible.

Ayman’s application was still being processed when he died at a
Yemeni hospital in May 2021, during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

A year-long HuffPost investigation found hundreds of cases of
Trump’s ban changing the lives of Muslims, both inside the United
States and around the world. Families have been ripped apart.
Educational and employment opportunities have been denied, maybe
forever. People have missed milestones like birthdays, funerals and
weddings. Some gave up on coming to the U.S. and instead relocated to
another country, while others have been trapped in war zones..

.

_HuffPost collected data throughout 2021 on people who have been
affected by the Trump-era travel ban, which included reaching out to
American organizations that work with Muslim communities, putting out
open calls on social media, and contacting lawyers and
activists. __An abridged and anonymized version of our data lives
here
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and our charts were built with Datawrapper._

_The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs published
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and quarterly reports after the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, which
included cumulative data on versions of the ban that were implemented
between Dec. 8, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021. However, that data is
somewhat limited because it does not show monthly breakdowns of
denials in 2017 and 2018._.

.

The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs tallied
[[link removed]] 41,876
visas denied between December 2017 and January 2021, but no single
agency or organization has collected comprehensive data on how tens of
thousands of people, many of whom were American Muslims, were
affected. But over the last year, HuffPost collected 874 stories of
people who, like Saleh, are still feeling the impact of Trump’s
travel ban five years later.

In an attempt to account for the ban’s far-reaching implications,
HuffPost spoke to lawyers, immigration groups and advocacy
organizations; interviewed dozens of families; and sifted through
nearly a hundred lawsuits. These numbers are not comprehensive due to
legal and practical limitations — including the fact that not all
impacted individuals could or did seek legal help — but the analysis
is the first of its kind and provides an in-depth glimpse into the
physical, mental and economic toll of those denials.

The nearly 900 cases we cataloged involve both parents being apart
from their children and romantic partners being separated. In more
than 100 cases, people reported medical hardship, including the
inability to help a family member with a health problem and trauma, as
an effect of the ban. In nearly 300 cases, or one-third of our data,
the family or person impacted faced more than one extreme hardship due
to the ban.

There were 11 cases like Saleh’s, in which separation meant never
again seeing a loved one because they died while the ban was in place.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order formally ending the
travel ban as one of his first acts as president, a move immigration
groups and affected families applauded. And in March 2021, the U.S.
State Department announced that people who had been denied visas due
to the ban could seek a revised decision or reapply.

But those applicants joined a backlog of nearly half a million cases
and a painfully long process that the pandemic has further slowed. In
January 2020, there were about 75,000 applications pending with the
State Department’s National Visa Center. By February 2021, the
number had increased six-fold, to 473,000.

Even Biden’s reversal left out one large group of visa applicants:
those awarded so-called diversity visas, which grant up to 50,000
people from countries with low levels of representation an opportunity
to migrate to the U.S. through an annual lottery. Several thousand
people from Muslim-majority countries who won visas were not able to
use them due to the ban and aren’t allowed to use them now. They can
reapply, but advocates said the chances of winning this rare
opportunity again are slim.

“For real people and real families, being stranded in dangerous
conditions can be life and death. It means permanent emotional
harm,” said Cody Wofsy, a staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants
Rights Project. “Even though the policies are now gone, you do see
the effects continuing to ripple out in people’s lives for years.”

One Family’s Fight

Saleh came to New York, where his own father lived as a citizen, as a
green card holder in 1995. Two years later, he met and married his
second wife, Amina, during a trip to Yemen. Together, they had five
children: Akram, Fares, Ayman, Omar and Bayen.

Saleh ping-ponged between the U.S. and Yemen, but his family stayed
behind. He opened a deli in Queens with his cousin and sent money to
his family. Then, in 2017, his wife died of complications due to high
blood pressure. His children were suddenly alone and very far away.

Trump had just been sworn in as president, and quickly made good on
his campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims
entering the United States.” On Jan. 27, 2017, just days after his
inauguration, he signed a directive placing a 90-day ban on people
from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria and Yemen. He also suspended the resettlement of refugees
for 120 days.

The move prompted immediate outrage. Thousands of politicians,
advocates and lawyers joined protests at airports including in New
York, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and Washington, D.C., where both
immigrants and legal permanent residents were being detained. Across
the globe, travelers panicked about whether they’d be able to enter
the U.S. Refugees who had been booked for travel to the United States
had those plans immediately canceled.

A federal judge in New York temporarily blocked the order
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those who had already arrived in the country or who were in transit
with valid visas, ruling they couldn’t be deported after they
landed.

That was just the first of many rulings as immigrant and civil rights
groups challenged the ban. Trump signed a new version of the ban in
March 2017, which critics labeled “Muslim Ban 2.0
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exempted anyone who already had a visa or green card and removed Iraq
from the list. The 4th Circuit of Appeals upheld the lower court’s
injunction that May, however, keeping the order on hold.

Trump tried again in September 2017, this time removing Sudan from the
list and adding Chad, North Korea, and certain members of the
Venezuelan government. In June 2018, the Supreme Court
ultimately upheld that version
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a 5-4 decision, concluding that the president had the authority to
implement the order on the basis of national security.

“It was a very intense litigation up and down to the Supreme Court
and courts all over the country,” Wofsy said. “Unfortunately, the
Supreme Court gets the final say, and it was extremely disappointing
and distressing that they blessed what everybody knew was just blatant
discrimination, motivated by President Trump’s very clearly
expressed anti-Muslim animus.”

As the legal battles dragged on around the U.S., Saleh sought legal
help to petition for visas for his children back in Yemen. He also
learned that he was qualified to become a naturalized U.S. citizen,
filed to move forward with that process, and gained citizenship. He
hoped doing so would help make a case for his children to enter.

[Omar Saleh stands near his father, Mohammed Saleh, while talking with
HuffPost last month. ]

Omar Saleh stands near his father, Mohammed Saleh, while talking with
HuffPost last month.

There are several ways children of citizens born outside the country
can acquire citizenship under U.S. law. Eligibility relies on several
factors, including the child’s year of birth, the immigration status
of both parents, and the number of years a citizen parent has resided
in the U.S.

Omar and Bayen qualified for U.S. citizenship, but were unable to
secure visas to board a plane to the U.S. Fares and Akram were left in
limbo awaiting interview appointments at the embassy in Djibouti so
that they could enter as permanent residents. And Saleh’s eldest
child, Khaled, was told to apply directly to the United States
Citizenship and Immigration Services since he was older than 21 and
not eligible to apply through his father. The process for all five was
long, complicated and riddled with setbacks.

HuffPost’s investigation found at least 341 other cases in which
parents have been separated from their children. In another 321 cases,
the ban put couples on different continents for years.

The impact behind these numbers is unquantifiable. Many said their
lives have been permanently upended, with experiences ranging from
emotional distress caused by extended separation from loved ones to
loss of jobs and investments. One woman was forced to give birth to
her child without her husband, a Somali national who was unable to
obtain a visa due to the ban in 2018. That same year, a Yemeni
American died by suicide
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his wife and two eldest children were denied a visa because of the
ban. Numerous students and academics said they were unable to enroll
in universities to which they’d been accepted. Many couples were
unable to start a family while forced apart from their spouses.

Saleh remarried in 2019, to an Ethiopian woman living in Yemen. She
had been a neighbor and had since taken in his children. He also
petitioned for her to join him in the U.S., but entered the same
precarious process.

The consequences of the ban were all around him: the emptiness of his
home without his children, the endless calls with lawyers and
officials. He’d go to bed every night exhausted from weeping.

He lived in constant fear of never seeing his family again — either
because the American immigration system wouldn’t allow it or because
they’d be killed by one of the bombs raining down in Yemen.

Yemen was one of the world’s poorest countries even before the war
began in 2014. The United Nations estimates that more than 10,000
people have been killed in Yemen since then, and more than 24 million
people require humanitarian assistance. The years of war have
decimated the health care system, and supplies, medical care, and
access to drinking water and sanitation are unstable. Treatable
diseases like cholera have killed thousands of people
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infected a million more.

The U.S. has provided billions of dollars in weaponry and intelligence
support to Saudi Arabia, which backs the Yemeni government. This has
further escalated the humanitarian disaster. As the U.S. closed itself
to Yemenis despite its complicity in the war, many Yemeni felt
particularly betrayed.

Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy
Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, said families
applying for U.S. visas from conflict zones face higher levels of
scrutiny.

“The U.S. government highly vets immigration applications from all
over the world. But that vetting can get very complicated and take a
very long time for people from countries where there are greater
security concerns or greater skepticism about the government’s
capacity to manage records,” Gelatt said.

The ban on Muslim-majority countries including Yemen and Iran further
complicated the vetting process and led to more denials, she added.

Permanent residence visas issued to people from Iran fell by 81%
between 2016 and 2018, the first year the travel ban was fully
implemented, according to MPI. For people from Yemen, the number of
immigrant visas issued over that same period fell by 91%.

Yasin Hassan, an immigration case manager at the Yemeni American
Merchants Association in New York who has been helping Saleh with his
case, said Yemenis face distinct and arduous challenges. There’s a
higher burden of proof for family eligibility and aggressive
interrogation techniques for routine consular services, which can
result in yearslong delays.

“In the eyes of the government and immigration, those systems
don’t trust the population and will often question basic
information,” Hassan said. “Because of that, cases have been
significantly delayed.”

Of the people in the HuffPost dataset whose nationalities are known,
almost 15% are of Yemeni origin. In 2021, the Biden
administration extended Temporary Protected Status
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approximately 1,700 Yemenis already in the United States due to the
worsening humanitarian and economic conditions under the war, but
experts have argued that Biden hasn’t done enough to end U.S.
support for offensive operations in Yemen.

“The systems still have a lot of this discrimination at a very
fundamental level, no matter what administration we have, no matter
who is president,” Hassan said. “It’s about how the system
functions, and sadly, I don’t think a change in administration is
solely sufficient to alter that.”

[Leyla Abbasnezhad had hoped to come to the U.S. after winning the
American Diversity Immigrant Visa Program lottery. Instead, she has
been forced to stay in Iran due to Trump's ban. ]

Courtesy Leyla Abbasnezhad

Leyla Abbasnezhad had hoped to come to the U.S. after winning the
American Diversity Immigrant Visa Program lottery. Instead, she has
been forced to stay in Iran due to Trump's ban.

A One In A Million Chance

Leyla Abbasnezhad, a 31-year-old Iranian, considers herself a lifelong
student. Her parents are both retired elementary school teachers who
always told her education was the key to success. Her mother taught
her math while her father read her Persian poems and literature, and
Abbasnezhad excelled at both.

She enrolled at the Islamic Azad University in Mashhad, one of the
largest private universities in the world
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over a million students across its international campuses.

Abbasnezhad earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, graduating
at the top of her class. In 2017, she enrolled in a program to earn
her doctorate in biomedical engineering, in hopes of returning to the
university as a professor.

That same year, Abbasnezhad threw her name in the American Diversity
Immigrant Visa Program lottery, hoping to immigrate to the U.S. and
continue her studies. This program, established in 1990, randomly
selects up to 50,000 people from countries with low levels of
representation in the U.S. for a visa. Since 2005, more than 200
million people
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countries around the world have applied for the program, including
more than 11.8 million people
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the 2021 fiscal year. During the 2018 fiscal year, the most recent
available numbers to date, 115,968 lottery winners
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chosen, among them only 4,500 were Iranians.

Immigration from Iran saw an uptick after the revolutions of the late
1970s, but Iranians are a relatively small slice of the overall
immigrant population of the U.S. Just over 12,000 of the 1 million
international students in the U.S. each year come from Iran. But among
those in HuffPost’s dataset, almost 40% had Iranian origins.

Abbasnezhad had hoped to become one of the lucky visa winners.

Her chance came in May 2017, when she received an email informing her
that she had won a spot for the following year. She was assigned an
interview date at the consulate in neighboring Turkey, where she
planned to receive her visa and then board a plane to America.

Abbasnezhad quit her Ph.D. program and bid farewell to her friends and
family. She enrolled in English classes. Her family threw her a
goodbye party. Abbasnezhad and her parents spent thousands on flights,
hotels and fees, and headed to Ankara for her interview scheduled on
Dec. 7, 2017. Armed with folders of paperwork and a single piece of
luggage, Abbasnezhad was ready to begin her new life in America.

But during her appointment, Abbasnezhad said embassy staff told her
they could not grant her the visa due to Trump’s travel ban. They
also said there was nothing she could do.

She walked out of the office, overcome by tears.

“I will never forget seeing my father crying. I could see how
disappointed he was at that moment,” she said.

[Leyla Abbasnezhad with her parents.]

Leyla Abbasnezhad with her parents.  Courtesy Leyla Abbasnezhad

A week after her interview, the embassy asked her for more paperwork,
and for a moment Abbasnezhad held onto a glimmer of hope. But in
January 2018, she received a formal rejection email that cited
Trump’s order. The American government had offered, and then
snatched back, her best chance to go to the U.S.

“They gave us this hope. They gave us this dream,” she said.
“They made this future possible for us in our minds and then it was
all destroyed with a piece of paper.”

She felt betrayed.

“We just wanted to have the opportunity to come to America, and then
after that, we would make it on our own,” she said. “We didn’t
want anything more.”

Abbasnezhad’s life spiraled. She fell into a depression. If she
wanted to reenroll in her Ph.D. program, she would have to take the
entrance exam again. The stress of the rejection took a toll on her
health, and her hair started to fall out. She regularly broke out in
hives and rashes. She has had to take medication to help with anxiety
and insomnia.

When Biden repealed the ban in January 2021, people across the globe
celebrated
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applicants who had been denied due to the ban could seek adjudication
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having to resubmit their applications or pay additional fees. Any
previous denials due to the ban would not negatively affect new
applications.

But there was no recourse for those who had won a diversity visa
between 2017 and 2020. Tens of thousands would have to reenter the
lottery and may never get the chance to come to the U.S. Diversity
visa seekers from African countries were also impacted, as
Trump expanded the travel ban
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2020 to include Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and
Tanzania. The change primarily impacted immigrant visas, specifically
people seeking to reside in the United States and diversity visa
seekers.

Nearly 12 million people applied to the program in 2021, according to
the State Department, and just 0.2% got a visa. The program also
limits how many people from one country can get a diversity visa to
3,840. Last year, 759,903 Iranians applied.

Organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and the
National Iranian American Council Action are lobbying the Biden
administration to allow past lottery winners to obtain a visa.

“The U.S. has made a commitment to offering these visas to these
people who would benefit tremendously from it, only to have a kind of
snatched away by a discriminatory immigration system,” said Ryan
Costello, the policy director at NIAC. “So many people put their
life savings on the line, quit their jobs, traveled to war zones in
some cases to have this opportunity.”

Legislative efforts to address the issue have also stalled in
Congress.

Abbasnezhad is still living in limbo. She hasn’t picked up work or
school, holding out hope that Congress will honor her visa. She has
joined various group chats with other diversity visa winners also
following the political debates and litigation, and she checks her
phone constantly. Some other members of those chats have moved on, she
said, but she can’t yet.

“Sometimes I think this pain will never stop,” she said.

[Mohammed Saleh and his family pose in the Queens neighborhood of
Rockaway. Amr Alfiky for HuffPost]

Mohammed Saleh and his family pose in the Queens neighborhood of
Rockaway. Amr Alfiky for HuffPost

Counting Down The Days Until Reunification

Saleh spent nearly three years in a similar limbo. His dark brown eyes
swell up with tears as he talks about it, and his salt and pepper
beard hides the wrinkles that have crept across his face.

He spent nearly every day on the phone with one lawyer and consular
official after another, attempting to use his limited English to
battle an immigration system that seemed hellbent on keeping his
family apart.

In August 2021, he went back to Yemen, determined that this time he
would not come back without his surviving children. It had been close
to a year since Biden rescinded the ban. Saleh spent nearly $2,000 on
five flights from Yemen to neighboring Djibouti, the closest country
with a functioning U.S. embassy since the one in Yemen closed in 2015.

For two months, Saleh and his children lived in a small apartment in
Djibouti that they rented for $1,000 a month. He still spent all his
time on the phone — with lawyers in the U.S., the embassy and
relatives who could translate for him. Each time he visited the
embassy, he was sent away with requests for more paperwork,
documentation or fees. He met Yemeni families who had been waiting on
American visas in Djibouti for more than a year. His family back in
the U.S. begged him to return, but Saleh was not going to board a
flight without his children.

Finally, on Nov. 22, 2021, Saleh’s children were granted visas to
enter the U.S., two as American citizens and two as permanent
residents. His wife is still waiting for her visa.

“We never imagined that we would leave Yemen,” said Omar, now 17.
The feeling he had once he was seated on the plane with his father and
siblings was nothing short of “pure happiness.”

Later that month, Saleh was back at his dining room table, the only
piece of furniture in the living space of a new apartment he secured
for his reunited family. He wore a gray sweatshirt and hat, while the
cold November wind hit his window. Omar and Bayen sat beside him. Omar
placed his hand on his father’s shoulders, attempting to comfort him
and remind him of his presence.

Life in Yemen brought unspeakable pain, Omar said, particularly after
the death of their mother and brother. Bayen had been sent to live
with her grandmother, while Omar, Akram, and Fares — still just
teenagers — had to fend for themselves. Omar taught himself how to
cook — how else would he and his brothers eat? At one point, Omar
and Fares contracted malaria and were sick for weeks, left to care for
one another. Saleh’s children have seen more than most adults,
having escaped death too many times for their short lifetimes.

“Holding onto any hope while in Yemen was hard,” Omar said. “It
felt that things got worse with each passing day.”

Now he beams with pride that he can make traditional Yemeni dishes and
stews for his father.

He and Bayen, 15, are looking forward to enrolling in school, though
they hope to master English first. Akram and Fares began taking shifts
at their cousin’s deli a few blocks from their Queens home. Days
after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport, Saleh took his children to
Times Square. They roamed the bustling midtown, dazzled and
exhilarated. They ate their first McDonald’s burgers and fries —
Saleh prefers home-cooked meals, but he’s been eager to let the
children try new things.

As we spoke, Bayen sat quietly in her chair, seemingly overwhelmed by
her new surroundings. She spoke softly among the voices of men around
her. She has her father’s eyes, elongated and dark brown, that lit
up when she spoke about her newfound future.

“It’s stunning here,” she said, adjusting her striped hijab.

Saleh, too, still seems stunned. He misses his wife and Ayman, and
can’t speak about them without breaking down. The pain is too raw,
he said.

But with his children all sleeping under his roof for the first time
in years, he started to feel a small sense of stability.

“They have a real future,” he said. “The world of possibilities
is open to them.”

_Rowaida Abdelaziz is a national reporter based in NYC where she
focuses on immigration, Islamophobia, and social justice issues. She
can be reached at [email protected]._

_This project was produced with support from the Investigative
Reporters & Editors’ Journalist of Color Investigative Reporting
Fellowship._

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