ISTANBUL — For Mohammed, an Iraqi civil engineer, the cruelest experience of his life was not when his father tortured him for being gay.

It was not when Islamic State extremists took over the 26-year-old’s hometown in northern Iraq, forcing him to flee to Turkey. Or when he says he was almost raped at knife point and later laughed out of a Turkish police station when he tried to report the crime. Nor was it in January, when President Trump first tried — unsuccessfully — to bar refugees from entering America.

As Mohammed tells it, the cruelest blow instead came this past week, when the United States Supreme Court agreed to reinstate Mr. Trump’s 120-day freeze on refugee resettlement.

Tens of thousands of applicants for resettlement in the United States are affected by the freeze, and Mohammed is among the unluckiest: His application has been accepted for months, and he was simply waiting for the American government to give him an arrival date.