Zakaria Hagig, a business student from Libya, is a plaintiff challenging President Donald Trump's travel ban in Denver. Credit:New York Times "I was just following the law and doing everything the way it's in the books. And it came to this." It came to this: more than 50 lawsuits across the country, with at least as many individual plaintiffs; a reprieve from a federal judge in Seattle; a new ban; and, on March 15, a new set of roadblocks from federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland. The government is opposing those decisions, which have drawn Trump's fury. His administration has insisted it will prevail. The people who sued the President this winter were Muslim, and they were Christian. They were professors and grocery clerks. They were parents, daughters and sons-in-law, and they were married but divided or just planning the wedding. They were Americans, or trying to become ones. They sued to place a different bet on the Constitution, staking their names on lawsuits that were part legal theory, part prayer.

Protesters at a rally against President Donald Trump's travel ban. Credit:New York Times The ban "isn't really what this country's about," Iye, 66, said recently through an interpreter. "I wouldn't have brought my family if I didn't love this country, if I didn't believe this country was the land of dreams." Trump's original executive order, signed on January 27, barred visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, including those with valid visas, from coming to the United States while federal agencies tightened their vetting procedures. It also blocked the entry of all refugees worldwide. The revision this month, an attempt to satisfy the courts, removed Iraqis, green card holders and visa holders from the list. Ali Asaei, an Iranian and plaintiff in Pars Equality Center v. Trump, in New York. Credit:New York Times If the plaintiffs in many landmark constitutional tests are meticulously chosen for their compelling personal stories - think Jim Obergefell, of Obergefell v Hodges, which established a national right to same-sex marriage - the first travel ban plaintiffs emerged out of frantic necessity, plucked from airports where they had been denied admission or from cities nationwide where citizens were waiting to reunite with relatives.

There was Allan Hakky, an Iraqi Kurd who found himself picking up the phone and volunteering to join a lawsuit after his mother-in-law had to abandon plans to visit a daughter with a premature baby in the United States. Juweiya Abdiaziz Ali, a Somali-born naturalised American, is challenging the travel ban in Seattle. Credit:New York Times "I'm a very private person, so to actually have my name on a federal lawsuit, on something so polarising and so in the headlines - if somebody told me this a year ago, I'd probably laugh at them," said Hakky, a technology executive who has lived in the US for 27 years. He said strangers had harassed his home with threatening calls ever since the lawsuit became public. But, he added: "I don't want to have to wake up one day and find a bunch of military people outside my house taking me to a camp the way they did to the Japanese. It's one of those things that, if you don't fight it at the beginning, does it get worse?". There was Juweiya Abdiaziz Ali, 23, a home health worker near Seattle who was within a month or two of bringing her 7-year-old son to live with her when the first executive order was issued. When the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a non-profit in Washington state, told her about efforts to sue, she offered to help.

"I hope that everybody understands this isn't just something on a piece of paper," Ali, a Somali-born naturalised citizen, said. Even if the legal challenge does not succeed, she said, "I can go to sleep at night knowing that I have done what I can legally to have my son with me." And in Euless, Texas, there was Paul Harrison, 61, American born and raised, whose engagement to an Iranian man the ban threatened to put asunder. The visa application of Harrison's fiance, whom he met on vacation, had been approved only 10 days before the first order took effect. Stranded 11,000 kilometres apart, he emailed every civil liberties group he could think of without expecting a response, "because we feel like we're just tiny little fish in a great big pond," said Harrison, who trains new flight attendants for American Airlines. He had never been one for politics before, he said. The American Civil Liberties Union asked him to sign on to the lawsuit it had filed in Maryland, International Refugee Assistance Project v Trump. This month, it became one of the two cases in which federal judges blocked the revised ban from taking effect. Like the other plaintiffs, the couple veer between dread and hope with each successive legal victory, each sign that the Trump administration will not relent.

"We look at each other and we say, 'Gosh, we don't know whether we should laugh or cry at any given moment'," Harrison said from Istanbul, where, unlike in Tehran, the couple is free to act like one. "Should we be happy? Should we be scared?" Since filing the lawsuit known as Hagig v Trump, Zakaria Hagig, 24, a business student from Libya at the Community College of Denver, has found himself in a split-screen America, being cheered by a crowd of protesters one moment, recoiling from hostile Facebook messages the next. Not that the plaintiffs have needed to sign court papers to feel the tremors of what many Muslims say is a heightened Islamophobia. In Los Banos, California, Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Ali, 39, a grocery store clerk born in Yemen and naturalized in 2010, has been able to bring his 12-year-old daughter to California after the first executive order stranded them in Djibouti for a week. It is a relief, he said, to be done with the incessant attention from the news media. His daughter, now a citizen, is settling into sixth grade. Ali, however, is still on edge over a threat no court can banish.

"It's started to feel a little bit different - everybody watching you, everybody looking at you. Something you never had it before, you never feel it before. Racist words," he said. "If I take my kids and wife to go shopping, to do this, to do that, I always worry that somebody will stop me on the way." The plaintiffs' faith has been shaken, strengthened and stretched again. So far, the America they know has come out on top. "In a funny way, even though I'm discouraged about how they're vilifying Muslims and using the presidential seal of approval to vilify Muslims, the lawsuits and people's response has made me feel even stronger about this country," Hakky, the technology executive, said. Loading "In any other country, when the president wants something, he gets it. The fact that a lowly judge somewhere can basically stop the most powerful man on Earth with a simple ruling is gratifying, and it shows what this country's all about."

New York Times