A Trip to See Her Ailing Sister. The First Visit With His Mom in Years. With a Stroke of Trump’s Pen, All Canceled.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens who live and work in the U.S. just had their world turned upside down. We talked to several about life under “The Muslim Ban.”

Photo by G. Morty Ortega / Getty Images

Azar Rahimi, a 32-year-old software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, has only gone back to Iran once since arriving in the U.S. to complete her Ph.D. seven years ago. “I’m allowed to work here, but every time I leave I have to apply for a new visa,” Rahimi explains. “When I went home in 2014 it took two months to get back.”

So Rahimi was ecstatic when she recently got her advance parole document, which, while she awaits her green card, would finally allow her to travel without worry between her home country and her adopted country. It came none too soon. Back in Iran, Rahimi’s 37-year-old sister was recently diagnosed with end-stage liver disease. After several surgeries, she has started a series of chemotherapy treatments, and Rahimi rushed to make plans to be at her side.

“She’s been hospitalized for the last few weeks and I call her almost every day to get an update on her situation,” says Rahimi. “I got the ticket last week to fly on February …