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The New York Times
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration quickly reverberated through the United States and across the globe Saturday, slamming the border shut for an Iranian scientist headed to a lab in Boston, an Iraqi who had worked as an interpreter for the US Army, and a Syrian refugee family headed to a new life in Ohio, among countless others.
Around the nation, security officers at major international gateways had new rules to follow.
Humanitarian organisations scrambled to cancel long-planned programmes, delivering the bad news to families who were about to travel.
Refugees who were airborne on flights when the order was signed were detained at airports.
At least one case quickly prompted a legal challenge as lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy International Airport in New York filed a motion early Saturday seeking to have their clients released.
They also filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and other immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry.
Trump's order, enacted with the stroke of a pen Friday afternoon, suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The White House said the restrictions would protect 'the United States from foreign nationals entering from countries compromised by terrorism' and ensure 'a more rigorous vetting process.'
But critics condemned Trump over the immediate collateral damage imposed on people who, by all accounts, had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States.
An official message to all US diplomatic posts around the world provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries affected:"Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance and printing" of visas to the United States.
Confusion turned to panic at airports around the world, as travellers found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States.
In Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from a flight they had boarded.
Seyed Soheil Saeedi Saravi, a leading young scientist in Iran, had been scheduled to travel in the coming days to Boston, where he had been awarded a fellowship to study cardiovascular medicine at Harvard, according to Thomas Michel, the professor who was to supervise the research fellowship.
But Michel said the visas for the student and his wife had been indefinitely suspended.
"This outstanding young scientist has enormous potential to make contributions that will improve our understanding of heart disease, and he has already been thoroughly vetted," Michel wrote to The New York Times.
"This country and this city have a long history of providing research training to the best young scientists in the world, many of whom have stayed in the USA and made tremendous contributions in biomedicine and other disciplines."
A spokesman for the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities - the association of large public colleges - said the group was aware of an Iranian undergraduate student who had been barred from boarding a flight.
A Syrian family of six who have been living in a Turkish refugee camp since fleeing their home in 2014 had been scheduled to arrive Tuesday in Cleveland, according to a report in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Instead, the family's trip has been called off.
Danielle Drake, a community relations manager at US Together, a refugee resettlement agency, told the newspaper that Trump's ban reminded her of when the United States turned away Jewish refugees during World War II.
"All those times that people said, 'Never again,' well, we're doing it again," she said.
