Denied entry

The lives of countless people in this country and abroad were immediately upended by President Donald Trump’s executive order banning entry to the United States by migrants, refugess, students and others from seven predominately Muslim countries in the Middle East.

These are just a few of their stories:

HAMID KARGARAN and ELAHEH IRANFARD

Hamid Kargaran was pacing in his San Francisco living room Sunday, not watching the news, trying to stay positive, waiting for his wife to call from Iran. She was due to leave for the airport within the hour, hoping that this time she wouldn’t be prevented from boarding a plane back home.

“We’re not letting ourselves even think that we won’t see each other again,” said Kargaran, 33. “I just can’t believe this is happening in America.”

Kargaran is a U.S. citizen, and a successful one. He owns a Bay Area marketing company that works with Google, as well as another that consults with medical practices, and he teaches at two local universities. His wife of two years, Elaheh Iranfard, 28, is a painter studying at the San Francisco Academy of Art. They both embrace California and U.S. culture with gusto.

“Her favorite is nude figures, which she couldn’t even do if she’d stayed in Iran,” Kargaran said.

Iranfard, who goes by Ellie, has had legal permanent residency for two years, but her green card didn’t help her Friday when she tried to get on a flight, any flight, to the United States.

She had been back home for a short visit with her family, a trip she had planned after her parents were unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States. But in the hours after Trump signed his executive order, the door slammed shut. Agents at multiple airlines told her she couldn’t board, legal U.S. resident or not.

For two sleepless days, Kargaran said, he has tried desperately to get information from airlines, government officials, friends and family. At one point, he staked out a part of San Francisco International Airport where Customs and Border Protection officers take their break. Three of them gave him different answers to the same questions; one of them told him that “Iranians are not our friends.”

It’s been a shock to a man who joined pro-American demonstrations in Tehran after terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. What he was hearing now, as friends advised him to scrub from his phone any social-media posts that suggested that he disagreed with Trump, reminded him of the Iranian repression that drove him from the country.

“I never thought when I moved here and made this country my home that this would happen,” he said. “I employ people, I pay taxes. We love this country. But I feel like the hard work has been meaningless. We’re second-class citizens.”

Now he was waiting, and he knew there would be no relief until his wife actually walked into the sun in San Francisco. In three hours, she would find out whether Lufthansa agents in Tehran would let her onto a plane. In Germany, she would learn whether officials there would let her transit to California. At home, she still had to pass through U.S. passport control.

“I don’t know,” Kargaran said. “We’ve tried to do everything right. Doesn’t that matter?”

–Steve Hendrix

THE SHAREFS

CAIRO – The photos of the Sharef family spoke volumes about their plight.

In the first two, the Iraqis are happily seated on their plane, smiling as they flew from their home in Irbil to New York. In the next few pictures, they are seated in Cairo’s airport, their faces glum and haggard. By then, they had been taken off their plane – and informed that they could no longer travel to the United States.

It did not matter that they had valid visas. It did not matter that they were headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to start a new life. The president’s immigration ban had caught up with the family of five.

“I am a very hard worker,” Fuad Sharef, the father, said by phone because the family was not allowed to leave the airport terminal. “Going to America was a dream for me and my kids. … Everything has gone down the drain because of Donald Trump.”

Down the drain means this: The family had sold their house, their car and all their possessions to start their new American life. They bought $5,000 worth of plane tickets. The children were pulled out of their schools. Sharef quit his well-paying job at a pharmaceutical company.

Also down the drain is their sense of security. Sharef once worked for a U.S. government subcontractor in post-invasion Iraq as an interpreter and a program manager. He got his visas, after two years of vetting, through a special U.S. resettlement program for Iraqi employees of the American government. Working for Americans was filled with perils, he said. He and other colleagues faced death threats; he knew co-workers who were kidnapped or killed.

On Sunday, he and his family – his wife, Arazoo, 41; his son, Bnyad, 19; his daughter Yad, 17; and another daughter, Shad, 10 – boarded a flight back to Irbil after spending the night inside the airport terminal.

“Donald Trump destroyed my life,” Sharef said. “How can he do this to people who risked their lives to help America?”

––Sudarsan Raghavan

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ABDI RIZACK

NAIROBI – On Friday morning, Abdi Rizack received the news for which he had waited 20 years. His application to be resettled in the United States had been accepted. His flight had been booked.

On Feb. 6, his itinerary said, he would be on his way to Columbus, Ohio. It was there on a document from the International Organization for Migration, next to the words “Port of Final Destination.”

“It was news that changed our lives. I gave up my heart to the U.S.,” he said.

The 32-year-old Somali did not know how to channel the excitement. Almost immediately, he began to pack his bags.

A few hours after he started celebrating, he received a different kind of news, this time on a television at the Kakuma refugee camp where he has been living since 2009, in a house made of sticks and a plastic tarp.

He saw an image of President Donald Trump on the screen, and then a reporter spoke. “He said they were banning Somalis,” he recalled.

There was confusion at the camp. Would his flight be canceled? No one seemed to know. He reached out to a friend who works for the United Nations, who had no clear answer. Many humanitarian workers were distraught over the news.

Rizack ws 7-years-old when he left Somalia a quarter-century ago. His aunt, uncle and grandmother had been killed in the civil war there. Years later, the country remains unstable, with the Islamist extremist group al-Shabab waging frequent attacks. Fighting among clans persists as another source of devastating violence.

Rizack’s family bounced back and forth between refugee camps in Kenya until finally landing in Kakuma. He watched many of his friends gain resettlement in the United States, and at times it seemed as if his chance would never come.

Yet he still thought of his hoped-for home warmly. Much of the assistance he received in Kakuma, including monthly food rations, bore American flags. He followed the U.S. election, mostly on the radio, and heard about the billionaire running for president. He did not think much about it.

“I must respect his policy as U.S. president,” he told himself.

Then came the shock of Friday’s executive order.

“It’s discrimination, and everything we hear is that in the U.S., there is no discrimination,” he said by phone.

He tried to figure out what to do. Maybe his flight would still depart, he thought. Maybe this would all be resolved by then.

“I’ve grown up here in a refugee camp. I can’t stay here forever. What life is this for a young man?”

–Kevin Sieff

SAHAR ALGONAIMI

Sahar Algonaimi was planning on staying in the United States for only one week. Her 76-year-old mother was undergoing surgery.

Algonaimi, a Syrian citizen, left Saudi Arabia on Friday. When she landed in Chicago the next day, she turned over her passport. She showed officials a doctor’s letter about the procedure. She told them that she had lived in Riyadh for more than 30 years.

But Algonaimi was told that Trump’s executive order prohibited her entry.

“I can’t describe to you how I felt – the disrespect for humanity, I am here to visit my sick mother,” Algonaimi, a first-grade teacher, said Sunday from the Middle East. “There is no good reason for me to not be able to enter. It’s a feeling of utter despair.”

At O’Hare International Airport, Algonaimi’s teenage nieces were waiting to pick up their aunt, said her sister, Nour Ulayyet. Finally, Ulayyet got a call from customs officials, asking whether she was waiting for someone.

“I said yes,” Ulayyet said. “And they said, ‘Well, we have her right here, and she cannot come in.’ “

Ulayyet, a U.S. citizen who lives in Indiana, begged the officials. Could Algonaimi please come in for just one day? It was an emergency situation. Maybe someone could come with her, like an agent. Algonaimi also was pleading and crying.

“I said how is it possible that I got all the way here and I can’t even see my mother?” Algonaimi recounted. “I told them, please let me go see her, one of you can come with me just so I can see her and then I’ll go right back. They said there is no way.”

Customs would not relent. They put Algonaimi on a plane home.

After Jamaleddin came out of surgery, Ulayyet was beside her in the recovery room.

Her mother took her hand and, speaking in Arabic, asked: Were they at the airport, waiting for Sahar?

-–Sarah Larimer

VAHIDEH RASEKHI

As midnight approached Saturday, Vahideh Rasekhi’s friends and a group of lawyers worked furiously at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to stop a flight that she had been ordered to board to go back to Iran because of the president’s immigration action.

Her advocates pleaded with customs officials, saying they would be violating a just-issued order by a federal judge if Rasekhi were forced to leave the United States. With the plane heading toward the runway, “we were panicking,” said Noam Biale, a lawyer with the International Refugee Assistance Project.

“Suddenly,” he recounted Sunday, “something worked.” The plane returned to the gate. “It was an incredible feeling. It’s not every day that you can turn a plane around through advocacy.”

After being held in detention for much of Sunday, the graduate student was released.

“I was super scared,” she told reporters at the airport, according to a video of the exchange that her friend posted on Facebook. “I haven’t slept for more than 48 hours.”

Rasekhi is completing her doctorate in linguistics at Stony Brook University on Long Island, where she was elected president of the Graduate Student Organization.

The Statue of Liberty appears in a photograph that she posted on her Facebook page in 2012.

Kristen Rouse, 43, who once went on a tour that Rasekhi led of the Persian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described her as an enthusiastic guide. “She’s an ambassador for Persian language and culture, and that’s exactly what we need in the United States,” Rouse said.

Rasekhi, who is in her mid-30s, had returned to Iran around Thanksgiving to see her family. During the break, she traveled to Armenia to renew her student visa, said a friend, Martin Smyth.

As she was preparing to come back on Friday, Rasekhi worried that Trump’s executive order would stop her from re-entering the United States. She called Smyth from JFK Airport about 10 p.m. Saturday to tell him that she’d been detained.

“She was a little rattled, her voice was a little shaky,” said Smyth, who tried to calm her by telling her about the federal judge’s stay of Trump’s order. “She said, ‘No one here seems to know that – they’re planning on putting me on a plane.’ “

At 12:30 a.m., she texted him to say that she was on a flight that was about to take off.

“Get off the plane,” he told her. But the flight crew had already shut the door.

“You need to make a scene,” he insisted.

Soon, the plane was returning to the gate.

–Paul Schwartzman