Lebanon
“We were very excited,” Moghimi said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “It was the light at the end of the tunnel. We were making plans about what we were going to do when we got here.”
Moghimi, a resident in internal medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, was born in the United States, grew up in Iran and holds citizenship in both countries.
His Iranian wife, Dorsa Razi (in Iran, married women keep their surnames), was a childhood friend, and after a reconnection and a courtship in recent years, they were married.
A month after their legal union, in July 2015, her residency application began.
The process lasted through the date of their formal wedding the following April, which they had pushed back in anticipation of the immigration process, and through their honeymoon in India.
It lasted through the summer of 2016, as the presidential election campaign raged and then-candidate Donald Trump reiterated his promise to ban Muslims from entering the country.
Finally, after stacks of documents and months of waiting, the U.S. Consulate in Abu Dhabi — there is no American embassy in Iran — scheduled for Razi what was likely to be her final appointment on Thursday.
Then came last Friday, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that temporarily bars immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Iran.
“Your interview has been canceled,” the consulate wrote back to Moghimi and Razi the next day, “and we will notify you if and when it will be rescheduled.”
Razi is still in the United Arab Emirates, and she and Moghimi have been left in limbo, wondering whether they should wait for the 90-day order to expire — or scrap their plans altogether.
“If it’s just a 90-day ban, which still seems unnecessary and unfair, that’s fine,” Moghimi said on Tuesday. “We can deal with waiting another three months.”
But Moghimi, who has read the executive order carefully, is concerned about a phrase that says the named countries — Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — must comply with specific security demands from the U.S. or perhaps face a permanent ban.
If compliance is not forthcoming from Iran’s government, which doesn’t even have formal relations with the U.S., then “I will have to leave the country,” Moghimi said, “and the life that I’ve pursued in the States will be thrown out the window.”
Moghimi was among many Upper Valley residents with ties to Islam or to majority-Muslim countries who expressed concern this week about government overreach following Trump’s order.
Politicians in the Twin States continued to react to the mandate early this week, as well.
After denouncing Trump’s decree this weekend, Vermont Governor Phil Scott on Monday said the executive action “infringes upon our constitutional rights,” according to a report from Seven Days, and issued a list of concrete steps he planned to make to fight it.
The newly elected governor, a Republican who spoke out against Trump during the campaign, said he was seeking legal opinions with an eye to challenging the order in court.
Scott will convene a “Civil Rights and Criminal Justice Cabinet” comprising high-level state executive and legislative officials to review Trump’s actions further, according to a Monday night news release from the governor’s office. He also will decline to enter agreements suggested under the executive order that ask state and local governments to coordinate immigration enforcement with the federal government.
“I believe these executive orders extend beyond the concerns we all have for preventing foreign terrorists from entering the country and reducing illegal immigration,” Scott said in the release. “These orders have the potential to erode civil liberties and states’ rights that we are all afforded by the Constitution.”
U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., on Monday decried the immigration ban on the floor of the House of Representatives, bringing with him photos of the first Syrian refugee families to settle in Rutland.
“These families survived a home being bombed, Al-Queda and ISIS terrorists, and the brutal violence of the Assad regime,” Welch said, according to a transcript of his speech. “They found temporary refuge in Turkey. They have now found permanent freedom in Vermont. These good people endured all of these hardships to do what all parents strive to do — protect their children from harm.”
Despite Trump’s calls during the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” the president says last week’s order was not based on religion.
People like Mostafa Ouajjani, a senior lecturer of Arabic language at Dartmouth College, were not convinced.
Ouajjani who was educated in Morocco and immigrated to the U.S. nine years ago, said that Trump’s executive order was likely to incite terrorism, not prevent it.
“Now, under Trump’s policies, which almost all Muslims around the world would interpret as Islamophobic, it has become very hard to fight such ideologies,” he said in an email Monday.
“How can you convince other Muslims overseas now that in America all faiths and religions — and even ‘irreligions’ — are alike when they see the heartless treatment and humiliation Muslims have received … at American airports? It seems that the rhetoric of the Crusades and the American war on Islam will triumph again. It seems that Trump’s policies are, in fact, counter-productive and that he is giving terrorists exactly the precious recruiting tools they can’t get otherwise.”
Iman Hammad, a senior at Dartmouth who has served as president of Al-Nur, the college’s Muslim student association, said some of her peers had been directly affected. One international student has had an internship rescinded after working toward it for a year, she said.
“There are still so many individuals who have not been affected at the policy level, but are feeling stressed and anxious due to the rhetoric caused by the President’s actions,” Hammad, who has U.S. citizenship, said in an email. “Most of us were born and raised in this country and the rhetoric they hear makes them feel unwelcome. On the other hand, observing the outcry and the protest allows us to feel so heartened and loved.”
The president’s immigration edict even has Muslims who are not from the seven named countries searching for exit strategies.
Saaid Arshad, a graduate student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, said he was considering leaving the U.S. if Trump’s ban were to expand in scope.
Arshad is an American citizen with roots in Pakistan, where his wife, another Dartmouth student, is a citizen. The newlyweds recently got started on her application for a green card, a process that he is hoping to expedite before something else happens.
“I have to get the paperwork done as soon as possible, before God knows what happens next,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
A practicing Muslim, Arshad also expressed concern that Trump’s ban would be understood as a move against Islam, regardless of what the president says. Arshad said he feared that the freedoms Americans enjoy at home would be lost, much in the same way that the U.S. government has undermined democratic regimes in countries such as Iran.
“If you have a good side and bad side of America, this is really that bad side taking over and becoming the public face of the U.S., not just internationally but locally,” he said.
Moghimi, who is not a practicing Muslim, is taking the executive action at face value, however.
“What is a fact that is plain and simple and can’t be debated,” he said, “is that this is discrimination that is based on nationality.”
That, Moghimi said, is enough to judge Trump’s ban unfair and impractical.
“There is no recourse given to us the way that the executive order is written right now,” he said. “No one has been able to provide a shred of evidence that this in any way is going to be able to help national security. There is no reason to block our case and to prevent my wife from coming here lawfully, and certainly none has been provided to us. It’s outrageous and it’s ridiculous.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.