Angela wasn’t looking for love when she knocked on a stranger’s door in her residence hall in France. As an exchange student far from her North Carolina home, she was emboldened by hearing English speakers on the other side.
But love is what she found. A Mauritian man named Hassen, in the first year of his master’s program in engineering, opened the door and welcomed her in. Hassen remembers the exact date—January 21, 2022—when a joyful American girl came bouncing into his room and into his life. To complete the setup straight out of a romantic comedy, Angela left her shoes behind (a total accident, she says) and before long, the two were dating.
Angela returned to France, where Hassen had taken a job after completing his schooling, to get her own master’s degree. They married in August 2024, and one month later they applied for Hassen’s spousal visa so they could build a life in the U.S. near Angela’s family.
The visa process, however, was slow. A year after their wedding, they were still waiting when Angela found out she was pregnant. She finished her degree in France and moved back to the U.S. in September 2025. The separation was supposed to be just a few months, until Hassen’s consular interview on January 7, 2026. Everything was perfectly timed. They could be together in the U.S. for the last few months of Angela’s pregnancy and prepare for the arrival of their child.
In an instant, everything changed—for Hassen and Angela, and for thousands of other couples around the world.
On December 16, weeks after an Afghan national shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, D.C., the White House expanded a travel ban implemented in June 2025 to include 39 countries, with no exception for immediate family visas. American citizens who had been waiting for years in the spousal visa process panicked. Everything they had worked for was on hold—indefinitely.
The ban was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, six days before Hassen’s interview.
Mauritania was among the 39 countries listed, but Angela said the couple remained hopeful. Hassen went to his consular interview, which he says went well. Until, as Hassen related, the officer asked if he had seen the news. Under the current rules, he could not issue Hassen’s visa. “If it were not for the ban, your case would have been approved,” Hassen recalls him saying.
Angela and Hassen scrambled to rearrange the next few months and made plans to have the baby, due in late March, in France. After that? They have no idea. And they’re not alone.
Six days later and thousands of miles away, a Somalian national named Maher received the same news at his consular interview. He’d met his wife, Zai, who was born and raised in Minnesota, online in 2021, and they had traveled the world together. They married in the summer of 2023 and had a child in March 2024, with Maher planning to join Zai in the U.S.
Zai, a special education teacher evaluator, visited Maher as much as her pregnancy and work schedule allowed. The first stage of Maher’s visa approval process lasted 22 months. After Zai experienced complications toward the end of her pregnancy, they applied to have Maher’s process expedited. The application was denied. Maher was living in Egypt while Zai gave birth alone and their newborn daughter spent a month in the NICU.
Finally, after years of grueling separation, Maher was on the cusp of being reunited with his wife and young daughter. But his interview was two weeks too late.
“It just doesn’t feel fair,” Zai said. “We want to be a family. My daughter’s turning 2. I want for her father to be present in her life. It’s not sustainable for me to live here, run our household from here, and then travel twice a year to go see him.”
The spousal visa process can be inefficient and frustrating even without a travel ban. First, the couple must submit proof of their marriage to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). On average, this approval process takes 14.5 months. Then the case is transferred to the National Visa Center, and the couple must pay another fee and file more documents. The last and final step is scheduling the consular interview, which can take anywhere from a few months to over a year, depending on the embassy. On average, the spousal visa process, especially for non-European countries, takes around two years and costs around $2,000, not including lawyer fees.
“When you first start the process, it’s overwhelming,” Dupe, an American citizen from New Jersey, said. She met her Nigerian husband, Taiwo, through a mutual friend. They got married in a civil ceremony in Nigeria, planning to have a large traditional wedding later. They applied for the spousal visa in June 2024 and, according to a countdown on the UCIS website, expected a decision by December 2024. When the countdown showed one day remaining, Dupe boarded a plane to Nigeria to begin preparations for their traditional wedding.
By the time she got off the plane, the countdown had reset to 14 months.
After numerous bureaucratic delays prompted Taiwo to pursue residency in Cameroon for the sake of securing a consular interview, he finally received an interview date for February 4, 2026. But President Donald Trump’s travel ban, set to start January 1, also included Nigeria.
The couple now has unanswered questions. Do they stay in Cameroon and wait for the interview? If Taiwo gets rejected there, does he have to start the whole process over? Should they try to reschedule it? What happens after? If he goes back home, will he lose his Cameroonian residency?
Dupe has tried but failed to find a remote job, and returning to the U.S. presents its own challenges. Flights can cost upward of $2,000, and—ironically—part of the visa process includes documenting how many times you see each other a year, and showing you can financially support your foreign spouse.
“It’s so hard to plan your life,” Dupe said. “You don’t even know where you’ll be tomorrow.”
Dupe and Taiwo’s dream of being parents feels like it is slipping away. “He wants children. I want children,” Dupe said. “I’ve always wanted to have children with my spouse. But we’re getting older, like time is of the essence as you reach a certain age.”
Despite years of being yanked around by the U.S. immigration system, Dupe is still determined to be with her husband. “I enjoy my husband,” Dupe said. “So that’s what makes it worth it. We laugh all the time. We have a good time. He’s worth it.”
The ban’s difficulty also lies in its uncertainty. Set to be reviewed every 180 days, the ban could be lifted in a few months, it could be revised, or it could remain in place for years. The “Muslim ban” Trump implemented in his first term lasted until Joe Biden took office and revoked it. However, the first Trump administration did revise it to allow exemptions for close family members of U.S. citizens. Affected couples have filed lawsuits against the bans, citing the non-discrimination clause of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). But litigation could take months, if not years.
Section 212(f) of the INA, Trump’s justification for the bans, does grant the president power to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants,” in cases where their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
A State Department spokesperson told The Dispatch: “A visa is a privilege. Visas are not a right. Under President Trump, the Department of State administers visa operations in a way that prioritizes the safety of the American people and our national interests, strengthens screening and vetting, and enforces the law.”
Trump’s first-term travel ban was challenged in Trump v. Hawaii, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban as constitutional. Constitutional or not, the current ban puts citizens who have already waited years to legally bring their spouse to the U.S. in a tough spot.
“We’re doing things the right way. Because of this travel ban, we got punished for that,” Jason, a U.S. citizen born and raised in Chicago, said. He met his Burmese wife, Htet, while traveling, and they applied for the spousal visa in October 2024. For more than 400 days, they waited for the application to clear the first step.
Trump announced the first travel ban of his second term in June 2025, a month before Jason and Htet’s traditional Burmese wedding ceremony. It included Burma, and Htet panicked.
“I took a look at it, and explained to her it doesn’t affect spouses,” Jason said. “Trump would never do anything like that. That’s too far.”
He spoke too soon. In the early morning hours of December 16, 2025, they submitted the last round of their documents. Later that day, news broke of the extended travel ban and its lack of exceptions for immediate family.
For many U.S. citizens, moving to their spouse’s country is difficult, or even impossible.
David is a research scientist who has worked for the federal government for more than 10 years. Due to the sensitive nature of his work, the countries he can work in outside the U.S. are limited, and certainly did not include his wife’s home country of Iran, even before the war broke out. The couple got engaged in 2021 and applied for a K-1 fiancée visa.
They expected to hear back in six months. It took 16.
Finally, in August of 2023, they reached the last step—the consular interview. They received a notice of “administrative processing,” meaning the embassy wanted to further review their case. They waited two years without hearing anything else. They married in September 2025 and applied for a spousal visa soon after. Then the travel ban was announced.
The stress of the process has taken a toll on David’s health, and has put strain on their relationship. Constant trips to see each other have depleted their savings. David is now considering quitting his job and finding a third country where they can live together.
“I have this existential choice of my wife or my career. No one should do that to anyone, but especially not a government that by its design is supposed to protect your rights,” David said.
Travel bans are not unprecedented in the U.S. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese workers from entering the U.S. for 10 years, and was extended another 10 years under the Geary Act. More recently, President Richard Nixon, in reaction to the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, blocked the entry of nationals from Arab countries in Operation Boulder. After the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Jimmy Carter issued Executive Order 12172, which eventually resulted in the cancellation of 55,000 Iranian visas. And in 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, which disqualified individuals with visa waivers who had recently traveled to seven high-risk countries. However, it did not affect the normal visa processing system or spousal visas.
Rekha Sharma-Crawford, second vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, notes one key difference between previous bans and the current ban: “While we have precedent for it, usually it’s to address a very pressing issue, right? A national security issue, or there’s some kind of conflict or something like that. In this situation no one really knows why they’re picking these countries.”
The sweeping reach of the bans is also a deviation from precedent. “It’s much like everything else this administration has been doing, which is, you know, they need a tap hammer and instead bring a sledgehammer. And they make these widespread, overbroad allegations without really providing any kind of support, without any kind of evidence,” Sharma-Crawford said.
Some couples have chosen to hop around the world visiting different countries together while waiting for spousal visas.
Chris, an American from Colorado, met Adenike through a couchsurfing program in Lagos, Nigeria. They got married in Lagos in May 2024. To spend time together during the visa process, they began to travel the world. Even though they’ve visited more than half of the world’s countries together, the U.S. isn’t one of them.
Chris started making videos of their adventures and uses his platform to raise awareness for the difficulty of the spousal visa process, the travel bans, and the State Department’s January immigrant visa freeze affecting 75 countries.
According to an estimate based on the last three months of available State Department data, the travel ban, if in effect until the end of Trump’s term, could affect 40,000 U.S. citizens, leaving them in limbo for years—unable to live in their own country with their own spouse, putting strain on their finances and health, and often preventing them from building families together, despite years of patient wading through the complicated legal process.
“It feels like as an American, this is my wife. This is part of me. I feel banned from my own country,” Chris said. “I can’t settle in my own country.”
