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Written by Rowaida Abdelaziz | Photography by Amr Alfiky

Jan. 25, 2022

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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 didnt 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 Trumps ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, issued in January 2017, meant Aymans visa application was delayed indefinitely. Saleh begged lawyers and advocates for help, but the ban made legal recourse all but impossible.

Aymans application was still being processed when he died at a Yemeni hospital in May 2021, during Islams holy month of Ramadan.

A year-long HuffPost investigation found hundreds of cases of Trumps 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.

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The State Departments Bureau of Consular Affairs tallied 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 Trumps travel ban five years later.

In an attempt to account for the bans 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 Salehs, 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 Departments National Visa Center. By February 2021, the number had increased six-fold, to 473,000.

Even Bidens 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 arent 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 peoples lives for years.

One Familys 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 theyd 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 for those who had already arrived in the country or who were in transit with valid visas, ruling they couldnt 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 . It exempted anyone who already had a visa or green card and removed Iraq from the list. The 4th Circuit of Appeals upheld the lower courts 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 in 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 Trumps 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.