The cruel travel ban has inflicted more unnecessary pain and hardship on yet another innocent family. In this case, the U.S. denied a German-Iranian man a visa when he needed to attend the funeral of his son, who had died in an accident here in the U.S.:

A German-Iranian father who wanted to travel to the United States to attend his son’s funeral was denied a three-day visa because the US said he was using “fraud or willfully misrepresenting a material fact” to obtain it.

Dr. Seyed Shahram Iranbomy’s 20-year-old son Irman (pictured above) died in a car accident in the capital Washington on June 10. He had been studying at a university in the US where his mother also lives.

Iranbomy, a human rights and discrimination lawyer who runs his own law firm in Frankfurt, told DW that the US consulate said he was taking advantage of his son’s death to immigrate to the US.

It is bad enough that the consulate would not grant Dr. Iranbomy a visa to attend his son’s funeral. That by itself would be outrageously callous and cruel. But to add insult to injury, the consulate accuses him of exploiting his son’s death as a way of getting into the country. According to the article, Dr. Iranbomy has lived in Germany for decades, so he obviously wasn’t trying to come here for a longer period of time. He was simply seeking to attend the funeral of his child. As if it weren’t terrible enough that this man has to bury his young son, he was not even allowed the dignity and the respect to take part in the funeral personally. Though he had previously had a long-term visa for travel to the U.S., that visa was revoked in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration.

Things are even worse for many Yemenis affected by the travel ban, which has split up families and trapped many in limbo:

Many Yemeni families like the Mohsins are stranded in Djibouti because of the war in Yemen and the U.S. ban.

“We have a lot of family separation. We have kids without parents, we have kids going to school without any support,” said Ibraham Qatabi, a senior legal worker at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the Mohsin family and dozens of other families that are separated by the ban. “We have moms and dads and children stranded abroad.”

And, he said, there is no recourse for these families.

“We are in a crisis right now that needs to be addressed and that’s not being debated in the broader American public,” he said.

The Yemenis affected by the ban are some of the most infuriating cases because one of our government’s policies contributes to the destruction of their country and another policy prevents them from escaping the disaster our support for the Saudi coalition has created. These people are trapped by an opaque, irrational process that has no discernible connection to national security. Like everything else related to Yemen, the effect of the travel ban on Yemenis receives virtually no attention, and when there is coverage of the issue it tends to be sporadic. The victims of the travel ban are by and large invisible to most Americans, and many of them have no one to advocate on their behalf.

Somali refugees who were preparing to come to the U.S. have also been blocked from coming thanks to reduced number of refugees being allowed in:

The 30-year-old is among the 26,000 Somali refugees living in Kenya, according to the UNHCR, who were ready to travel to the US before being stopped by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in 2017.

Half of them had been interviewed by US officials while the others were to be interviewed by the State Department, with some 14,500 of them living in Dadaab, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“I sold everything that I had because I was told that I passed all the vetting required for me to be resettled in the US. The news of the ban devastated me. I did not know where to start,” says Salat, a father of three who was two years old when his family came to this camp in 1992.

These arbitrary decisions have real consequences for the lives of tens of thousands of people, many of whom have already waited for decades for the chance to be admitted as refugees before having the door abruptly slammed in their faces.

Here is another story of a husband and wife arbitrarily separated because of the ban:

In the past three years, the young Iranian couple have lived a virtual marriage despite long-held plans to start a life and a family in the United States. Keshtmand filed a petition for his wife to be granted an F-2A family-based visa in June 2016, starting the process before becoming entangled in President Donald Trump’s Travel Ban proclamation in 2017 that indefinitely suspends the issuance of immigrant and most, if not all, nonimmigrant visas from several Muslim-majority nations, especially Iran.

Wrapping up the conversation with his wife, Keshtmand turns to the Consular Electronic Application Center website to check for any updates on her application before entering a confidential case number. “I know it better than my own name now,” he says.

As with numerous previous check-ins, there’s no update. When he turns next to checking the website for the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where his wife did her visa interview in August 2017 (there’s no U.S. Embassy in Iran), the response addressed to her is a familiar one: “Your application for a U.S. immigrant visa is undergoing routine administrative processing. As soon as this processing is completed, the Embassy will post a message to this website with further instructions.”

The last update on the case is dated Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2018.

How has the U.S. been made safer by keeping this married couple apart and putting an extraordinary strain on their marriage? Of course, the U.S. is not the slightest bit safer because Tahereh Fereydouni isn’t allowed to join her husband in this country. The government holds out the prospect of receiving a waiver when only a mere 5-6% of applicants receives one, and it’s on the basis of this sham of a waiver program that the travel ban was upheld. Joshua Geltzer and Neal Katyal remind us that the waiver program was very important to the Court’s decision to uphold the ban, and they point out how worthless it is in practice:

The waiver program looked like a sham a year ago, as a consular officer made clear in a sworn affidavit in another matter and as Justice Stephen Breyer emphasized in his powerful dissent. It looks like even more of a sham now. According to the Trump administration’s own data, between December 2017 and May 2018 approximately 98 percent of those who applied for a visa to travel to the United States did not receive a waiver. More recent reporting still shows only 6 percent of those subject to the travel ban receiving waivers. What’s more, the process even for seeking a waiver has remained opaque to the point of being inscrutable. So have the criteria by which consular officers evaluate the waiver applications they do receive. The waiver process held up by the court’s majority a year ago continues to let down applicants today.

The travel ban is a purely vindictive policy that punishes people solely because of their nationality. It may be technically legal according to the Supreme Court, but it is clearly unjust. The travel serves no legitimate purpose, but it does impose enormous hardship and costs on thousands and thousands of people that pose no threat to anyone. It is a disgrace, and rescinding this ban should be a top priority for the next administration.