LOS ANGELES >> An Iranian citizen with a U.S. student visa who was denied entry at Los Angeles International Airport last month under President Donald Trump’s travel ban had an emotional reunion at the airport Sunday with family and friends.
Sara Yarjani, a graduate student at the California Institute for Human Science in San Diego County, returned to Los Angeles two days after a federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary and immediate nationwide halt against the immigration order involving nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran.
• Video: Grad student denied entry during travel ban arrives at LAX
“I’m grateful for everyone that’s been so supportive since I was detained here for 23 hours last week…” a tearful Yarjani, 35, said after embracing her youngest sister as a throng of reporters encircled her at the Tom Bradley International Terminal. “There’s been so many messages and calls and emails and everything from people I don’t even know of support and love and I am so grateful.”
Yarjani, who was born in Australia and has lived in Europe for most of the last two decades, said she was especially grateful for the attorneys who did all they could to try to keep her from being sent back, as well as those who sent support to her family during the weeklong ordeal.
“I’m grateful because for me, that’s America and I love that,” she said.
Yarjani was removed nearly two hours after a federal court in New York ordered that the government stop all removals immediately, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Hours before she arrived at LAX on Sunday, a federal appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request to set aside the temporary halt on the travel ban that was issued Friday by the federal judge in Seattle.
State Department officials have said the U.S. canceled the visas of as many as 60,000 foreigners in the week after the 90-day ban on travel from citizens of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen took effect. Trump also suspended nearly all refugee admissions for 120 days and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely.
Trump, who has said the travel ban is necessary to keep terrorists out of the country, denounced U.S. District Judge James Robart, who put the ban on the hold, in a series of Tweets over the weekend.
“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump wrote Sunday. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”
Yarjani’s sister Sahar Muranovic, who flew in from Washington state to meet her sister and has a green card, said she hopes the government “can see the human cost” of the controversial immigration order.
Yarjani was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and then forced to leave the U.S. after arriving at LAX from Vienna, Austria, on Jan. 27.
“It was very rough for her the way she was treated because she was legally trying to come in, then detained for 23 hours and treated like a criminal,” Muranovic said Sunday before the reunion.
Yarjani had a multiple-entry student visa since September 2015 that allowed her to go back and forth when she was denied entry last month after visiting her parents in Vienna during winter break, said Andrés Kwon, an Equal Justice Works Emerson Fellow and an attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.
While she was detained, she was coerced into signing a withdrawal of her visa application and told that if she didn’t, she would be forcibly deported and risk being barred from the country for several years, ACLU attorneys said.
Yarjani will now be able to continue her studies in holistic health in Southern California and obtain a master’s degree, Kwon added.
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, said she and Rep. Nanette Barragán, D-San Pedro, did all they could last month to prevent customs officials from putting Yarjani back on a plane to no avail.
“It is very gratifying to see that finally we have the rule of law; that we have a federal court order stopping this,” Chu said. “This court order must be maintained … We will fight as much as we can to make sure that it is upheld.”
An Iranian couple, ages 72 and 65, also arrived at LAX Sunday afternoon after they were turned away last month by U.S. officials in an Arab Gulf state last month while en route to LAX to join their U.S. citizen son, said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. The couple had immigrant visas but were coerced into signing a document that canceled their request for admission into the U.S., she said.
“You expect to be discriminated against in the street … but when you see the highest level of authority, which is the president, discriminating against you or the country you’re coming from or a religion that I don’t even practice … it’s so disappointing,” said their son Hesam Moazzami, a business banker who lives in Beverly Hills, as he waited to see his parents.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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