Lives Rewritten With the Stroke of a Pen

Had all gone according to plan, after an overnight flight from Doha, Qatar, Hamdiyah Al Saeedi, 65, would have landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on Saturday and then boarded a connecting flight to Raleigh, N.C., to meet her son Ali Alsaeedy, whom she had not seen in five years.

It was not by chance that her new life as an American immigrant would begin in North Carolina. Her son is a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, which is based at Fort Bragg.

When she did not show up at the airport, Sgt. Alsaeedy’s immediate fear was that his mother, who does not speak English, had somehow gotten lost.

He flew to New York, where another reality awaited him. His mother was not lost: She was being held somewhere in Terminal 4 by authorities who were threatening to deport her. “They wouldn’t even let me see her,” Sgt. Alsaeedy, a newly minted American citizen, said by phone on Sunday morning from the airport, where he was still waiting for his mother.

A native of Baghdad, Sgt. Alsaeedy has been working for the American government for much of his life. After the 2003 invasion, he was an interpreter for seven years, working for the American military and the United States Agency for International Development. For his service, he eventually received a special immigrant visa and emigrated to the United States.

He joined the Army and returned to Iraq in 2015, this time as a United States soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division. “I cannot tell you what I was doing,” he said when asked about his role. All he would say was this: “The mission we were doing there, I was a part of it.”

For years, he had been filling out endless forms so that his mother and his father could join him in America. “I started the process five years ago to bring both parents to this country,” Sgt. Alsaeedy said.

In December, his father died. A few weeks later, his mother’s visa was approved. He immediately booked a flight for her. At the moment that the president signed the immigration order, at 4:42 p.m. in Washington on Friday, she was probably waiting to board her flight in Doha.

When Sgt. Alsaeedy arrived at J.F.K. searching for his mother on Saturday, other families were waiting at the airport with similar stories. With the help of lawyers, he filed a habeas petition for her release. And his morale was buoyed by the swelling protests outside.

“This country is great because of those people, the thousands outside who were protesting and helping people with whom they have no relation,” Sgt. Alsaeedy said. “Even in my worst situation, I felt hope and freedom and that there are great people.”

But even as the protests were occurring, Sgt. Alsaeedy received a phone call with crushing news. A federal agent told him that his mother would be deported on a flight bound for Germany around 9 p.m. The agent offered to put Sgt. Alsaeedy’s mother on the phone to say goodbye. She was crying.

“I was hoping to see you and hug your child,” she said, according to Sgt. Alsaeedy, who said he was stunned, unsure what to say.

“It’s not over,” he said, hoping to calm her down.

In the end, his mother was not deported. She was held for more than 33 hours, handcuffed for some of the time, and was denied a wheelchair, according to a lawyer for Sgt. Alsaeedy, Molly Lauterback of Brooklyn Defender Services. They were reunited at J.F.K. after 4 p.m. on Sunday.

— Joseph Goldstein

Masoud Zarepisheh should have been celebrating the birth of his first child, a daughter named Liana, born four days ago in New York. Instead, on Sunday morning, he was at Kennedy International Airport, waiting for his 60-year-old father and his 30-year-old brother, who had been detained for more than 30 hours since arriving from Iran on Saturday morning.

“I am so angry at this president,” Mr. Zarepisheh said. “Instead of being at home caring for a newborn, we are under so much pressure.”

Mr. Zarepisheh, 36, an American citizen, is a researcher in the medical physics department of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His wife, also a citizen, works for the city’s Department of Mental Health and Hygiene.

His mother arrived two weeks ago from Iran, in anticipation of the baby. She has not stopped crying — along with the newborn, he said. Mr. Zarepisheh had been able to speak to his brother, Mahmood, and his father, Zabihollah, only twice since Saturday morning. They, too, were crying on the phone, he said.

Carrying valid tourist visas, they were first kept in Terminal 1 after landing but were moved to Terminal 4 on Saturday night. Mr. Zarepisheh said he believed they had slept on chairs.

A mathematician who earned his Ph.D. in Iran and did his postdoctoral at Stanford University, Mr. Zarepisheh was appalled at his family’s treatment.

“It does not make sense; it’s a political action,” he said. “To me, the president is just a populist, a populist virus that has infected the U.S. right now, and I hope he will get the country vaccinated against populism.”

Around 6 p.m. on Sunday, Mr. Zarepisheh said, officers in the room where his brother and his father were being detained suddenly announced, “The problem has been solved, and you can leave now.”

For Mr. Zarepisheh — sleepless like his brother and his father — the moment was surreal. “It was like a dream,” he said. Or, he acknowledged, more like a nightmare.

— Liz Robbins

BAGHDAD – Last month, Adawr Oraha flew from his home in Phoenix to Kirkuk in northern Iraq to carry out his responsibilities as a member of the provincial council. He planned to return to Phoenix next week.

Now Mr. Oraha, a green card holder, is uncertain about his ability to return. Though at first he seemed to be banned from reentering the United States, he and other green card holders appeared to get a reprieve when Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that green card holders from the seven nations included in the ban were not affected – although he said border agents had “discretionary authority” to detain and question suspicious travelers.

Mr. Oraha, 65, who said he suffers from diabetes and a respiratory ailment, said he sold his home and possessions in Kirkuk when he and his family moved to Phoenix in 2011. With a daughter, now 31, and a son, now 24, the family built a new life and bought a new home in Arizona.

Mr. Oraha, a former deputy governor of Kirkuk province, said his wife had entered the country in 2011 on a Special Immigrant visa, granted for her work assisting American troops in Iraq.

On Sunday, Mr. Oraha said he spoke by phone to his wife, who was worried about his health if he is forced to remain in Iraq for an extended period. He said he has no long-term place to live.

“Me and my wife and my kids are loyal Americans,” Mr. Oraha said. “We love it just like it is our motherland.”

He added: “I say to Mr. Trump, ‘We adore America, but our dream has been lost with Trump.’”

–David Zucchino

After more than two years without seeing their mother, Shadi Darani, 26, and her sister, Farzaneh Darani, 28, had been looking forward to her arrival in the United States on Saturday morning.

But when Farzaneh Darani, a doctoral student in chemistry at the University of Delaware, went to pick up her mother at the Philadelphia airport on Saturday morning, her mother did not emerge. The sisters learned that she had been detained and almost immediately put back on a flight bound for Iran — but they did not know what flight. And their mother, 56, had somehow lost the use of her cellphone.

“My mom was on the flight for almost one day, and we didn’t know where she was, and finally this morning, an hour ago, she called my dad,” Shadi Darani said Sunday morning. “She said that her passport was detained and a security guard was following her from airport to airport and flight to flight.”

Ms. Darani, 26, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, said the experience had left her family frightened.

“We all came here to work and study,” she said. “We all love the people around us, and we want to be loved. But now it seems that we are not welcome here and they are treating us like terrorists. It’s really making us sad and hopeless. We don’t know what to do. No degree or nothing here would matter more than my dad or my mom.”

Ms. Darani asked that her mother’s name not be published because the family hopes for a return visit and worries that publicity will damage her chances for a tourist visa to the United States. The process took five months last time.

“She’s a retired teacher, and she has never done anything to this country or anybody else,” Ms. Darani said.

— Stephanie Saul

After four years, Askar Sahebjam, 73, a retired engineer who has a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, had finally been approved for a green card. He was moving from Iran to Tampa, Fla., where his daughter is an oncologist.

With their papers all in order, Mr. Sahebjam and his wife, Roghayeh Hashemy Soodmand, 52, paid $5,800 for one-way business-class seats on an Emirates flight to Orlando International Airport, arriving on Saturday morning, ready for their new life in America. Mr. Sahebjam brought his daughter a gift, a Persian rug.

Instead, they were held and interrogated for nine hours, their cellphones searched. Mr. Sahebjam was eventually allowed to speak to his daughter, but only on speakerphone and only if they agreed to speak in English in front of the agent.

“They treated us like we were two spies or two criminals,” said Dr. Solmaz Sahebjam, Mr. Sahebjam’s daughter, who works at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. “The agent got on the phone and asked me what I do. I said: ‘I am a doctor. I treat brain cancer.’ We are working hard in this country. We are helping people in this country. Our parents are not terrorists.

“They are aged, and they had all the legal documents — given to them by the U.S. government.”

Dr. Sahebjam said the agent told her that her father’s entry visa had been revoked. At about 7:30 p.m., just hours before a judge’s ruling that stayed part of the executive order, he was put back on a plane and sent home to Tehran. His wife, who had already received her green card, was permitted to stay, but she left with him for Iran because she did not want to live in the United States without her husband.

She had to spend another $3,000 for a flight back. By Sunday afternoon, they were still en route to Tehran, having booked flights through Frankfurt.

Dr. Sahebjam said she doubted that her father would ever try to come to the United States again and that she would have to move back to Iran to care for him.

“This is so demeaning,” she said. “They were furious and feeling so offended.”

— Frances Robles

Samira Asgari, an Iranian citizen who was scheduled to fly to Boston on Saturday morning to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, was told in Frankfurt on Saturday that she could not board the plane.

“I was pretty excited to join @soumya_boston’s lab but denied boarding due to my Iranian nationality,” she posted on Twitter. “Feeling safer?”

Dr. Asgari, 30, had recently completed her Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was planning to study the genetic roots of why people respond differently to tuberculosis infections.

Soumya Raychaudhuri, an associate professor in the department of medicine at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had recruited Dr. Asgari to join his laboratory after hearing her present her work at a scientific conference in New York last spring. He said the news of her denial was disturbing for his lab and for all of American science, which increasingly competes with other countries for talented young researchers from around the globe.

“We’ll do whatever we can to get her here,” said Dr. Raychaudhuri, whose father worked as a researcher at Eastman Kodak for many years after he emigrated from India to study in the United States. “We have a lot to learn from her.”

In an email, Dr. Asgari said her visa had been approved on Jan. 25. On Saturday, she flew from Geneva to Frankfurt. There, she stood in line to board her Lufthansa flight, but when she presented her boarding pass to be scanned, “I didn’t get the expected green light,” she said. “I got a red light.”

A man who introduced himself as a United States consular official told her that her visa was no longer valid. “The rules had changed that morning,” Dr. Asgari said.

Dr. Asgari called Dr. Raychaudhuri to inform him and her boyfriend, who had resigned from his job to accompany her in Cambridge, Mass. She then returned to Geneva and took the train back to her apartment in Lausanne, where she had one more day on her lease. Several former colleagues and friends have offered her a place to stay temporarily.

— Amy Harmon

Ibtisam Mahmoo Hussein’s 91-year-old mother is in an intensive care unit in a Las Vegas hospital, and Ms. Hussein cannot get on a plane to go see her.

Ms. Hussein, 64, lives in Oman with her husband, a retired diplomat, and she carries an Iraqi passport. Several members of Ms. Hussein’s family — four siblings and her mother, Shukriya Tawfiq Hussain — are American citizens.

At the end of last year, Ms. Hussein applied for a visa to visit the United States so she could see her elderly mother for the first time since 2013. The process went smoothly, and she was quickly approved. She began planning her trip, thinking she had time to buy the tickets.

Then, a few days ago, her mother fell, breaking her hip, and needed surgery. Suddenly, everything changed.

“My mom is in a critical situation,” said Nasreen Alkafaji, one of Ms. Hussein’s sisters.

Ms. Hussein would like to visit their mother, in case this is goodbye, but with the travel ban in effect, she cannot do so.

“She has no bad intentions,” Ms. Alkafaji said. “They have a good life in Oman.”

The family is originally from Baghdad. Ms. Alkafaji came to America in 1979. One of her brothers followed three years later. In 1991, their mother joined them, driven out by the gulf war. One by one, her siblings followed. But Ms. Hussein never did. Now, she is tethered to her phone late into the night in Muscat, Oman, frantic for updates that she cannot receive in person.

“I keep crying and looking every five minutes, asking from my sister about my mother’s health,” Ms. Hussein said.

“I’m afraid,” she said, her words catching in her throat, “I won’t be able to see her alive.”

— Elizabeth A. Harris

Douman Khoshbakhti has lived in the United States for 10 years, and about three months ago, his mother arrived from Tehran to join him. His father, Ali Khoshbakhti, 53, stayed behind to tie up the loose ends of a lifetime. He sold his car and the family’s construction supplies shop.

He was to join his family in America on Friday night.

Instead, after he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport at 7 p.m., he was detained throughout the night and much of the following day. Just hours before a judge blocked parts of Mr. Trump’s order on Saturday, Ali Khoshbakhti was put on a flight to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that would eventually return him to Tehran.

“He was coming here to live,” Douman Khoshbakhti said. “Right now, he has to go back to Iran, and he doesn’t have anything left there.”

Mr. Khoshbakhti’s uncle in Los Angeles went to the airport to pick up his brother, and for hours, he heard nothing. Around 11 p.m., the family was finally told he was in detention, but they were not allowed to speak with him. Around 2 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Khoshbakhti spoke with his father for about two minutes.

“He said, ‘They are holding me like a prisoner,’” Mr. Khoshbakhti recounted.

Mr. Khoshbakhti, 29, a nurse, works at a nursing home in Fort Wayne, Ind. He has been a United States citizen for three years, and he sponsored both of his parents for green cards. His father arrived on an immigrant visa, the same type of visa that his mother had used a few months before.

“Everything is the same,” he said of his parents’ process through the immigration bureaucracy. “So how come two months ago there is no problem, and now, after two months, we can’t even talk to you?”

— Elizabeth A. Harris

When two brothers from Yemen landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Saturday morning, they thought they would be connecting to Flint, Mich., to join their father.

Instead, Tareq Aqel Mohammed Aziz, 21, and his brother Ammar, 19, were taken off the plane, put into handcuffs and ushered into a room. Two hours later, they were on the same airplane back to Africa.

The two young men had immigrant visas, meaning they were approved for legal permanent residency, because their father, Aqel Muhammad Aziz, is a United States citizen.

“They took off two hours before the executive order was signed,” said their lawyer, Simon Y. Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the Immigrant Advocacy Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center. “They had no idea what they were walking into. This was this moment they had been waiting for, and all of a sudden, it turns into a horror show.”

Because the United States embassy in Yemen has been closed since 2015, the brothers had to go to Djibouti to get their visas approved. Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said the brothers were told by officers in Virginia: “Your visa has been canceled. You need to sign this form. If you don’t sign this form, you are going to be barred from the United States for five years.”

The brothers signed. But then customs officers said they had to return to Africa immediately. That most likely meant, Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said, that they had signed a form volunteering to give up their permanent residency rights.

Neither their lawyers nor the men’s father knew what was happening, believing them to be detained at Dulles. Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg filed a petition on behalf of them and the other 60 or so people detained at the airport.

At midnight on Saturday, Mr. Aziz got a call from his sons. They were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

And now, they are stuck there indefinitely. Ethiopian officials, Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said, confiscated the brothers’ Yemeni passports. Flights are suspended because of the war in Yemen, and without passports, they cannot go back to Djibouti, where they had been staying for more than a month before they got their visas.

“They are really in this Tom Hanks limbo,” their lawyer said.

On Saturday, a federal judge had blocked part of the immigration order, ruling that the petitioners, all of whom had legal permanent resident status, could have access to lawyers during detention and that those with legal status could not be removed for seven days.

But for the Aziz brothers, it was too late.

— Liz Robbins

Sitting on Sunday evening at Safari Restaurant in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the owner, Shakib Farah, 33, awaited the daily 1 a.m. call from his cousin, Mustafa Hashi Egal.

Both men are United States citizens who escaped Somalia’s civil war as refugees 15 years ago. Mr. Egal, who runs a trucking business in Minneapolis, had left Somalia to have the chance to eventually bring his 82-year-old mother to the United States. After two years of fighting for her visa — and succeeding — he was supposed to be on a flight with her on Tuesday to take her to her new home in the Midwest.

Mr. Egal can get on the Emirates Airlines flight he has booked for Tuesday morning, but even though his mother, Fadumo Haji Mohamed, has a brand-new visa, she now cannot.

Somalis must first travel to Nairobi, Kenya, to obtain the proper documents, and that is where Mr. Egal, who could not be reached, and his mother are stranded.

In every phone call, Mr. Egal’s voice is filled with fear, Mr. Farah said — the fear that he will not be able to get his mother permanently out of their home country, where terrorism by the Shabab group has replaced the violence of a years-long civil war. Last week, an explosion rocked Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, killing at least 21 people, according to reports.

“Imagine living in the city, and right in Central Park, the artillery of a war machine is rampaging all over,” Mr. Farah said of life in his native city. “That’s what it is.”

He added: “We went through a very bad war that I don’t wish for anybody on this earth, and now, our people are being killed daily by Shabab terrorists. And the survivors that are trying to get a better life outside Somalia are being told that you are similar to the terrorists that are killing you there.”

— Sarah Maslin Nir

Ammar al-Sabahi has not seen his wife, Zainab, or their children since they left for their native Iraq last year after receiving devastating news: Ms. al-Sabahi’s mother had been badly hurt in a car crash, and two relatives, one eight months pregnant, had been killed.

The unborn baby died, too. The group’s car was hit by a truck while on the way to a prenatal doctor’s appointment.

Mr. al-Sabahi and his family came to the United States as refugees last year after he spent a decade working for the United States military in Iraq, a job that brought both Mr. al-Sabahi and his wife threats from militia groups.

After getting news of the crash, his wife “was crying so much that I said, ‘Maybe you should go back to see your family,’” said Mr. al-Sabahi, who drives for a ride-hailing service in Austin, Tex. “I was working so much, so she took the kids because they couldn’t be home with no one to be responsible for them.”

They thought Ms. al-Sabahi and the children would be gone for no more than a month, but they have been trapped in Baghdad since April because they did not seek the United States government’s permission to travel, something refugees are required to do.

Mr. al-Sabahi said that they did not understand the rules and that his wife “just wanted to see her mother because we were afraid her mother was going to die, too.”

His family had one year from the day they left to apply for permission to re-enter the United States and were just wrapping up that process when Mr. Trump signed his executive order, said their lawyer, Hannah Silk Kapasi.

The deadline is April 19, 2017. The executive order bars all refugees from entering the United States until May 28.

“Ammar was a contractor for the U.S. government,” Ms. Kapasi said. “He was helpful to the U.S. government, and for that reason, he sought and received the protection of the U.S. government when he came to this country.”

She added, “I certainly hope we can see this family safe and reunited.”

Mr. al-Sabahi said he just wanted the chance to build the life that seemed so close.

“We are so tired of being far apart,” he said. “There is no future for our children in Iraq. The country is destroyed. There is nothing left for us there. We just want a nice life for our children. We are just human beings.”

— Liam Stack