‘‘We think only about traveling,’’ he said. ‘‘All we want is to go the United States.’’ Day after day, he checked the news on Facebook and chatted with his mother in Aurora. ‘‘We hope to live in a simple house, with a car outside, and just to watch our kids grow up,’’ Noorhan said. ‘‘That’s it. We don’t want a palace or some luxury life.’’

When the rest of his family left in March, Waseem thought he would have to wait for about a month at the most. One month was now eight. As it grew colder, he stopped walking along the highway looking for illegal construction jobs. The market for day laborers was drying up. He didn’t dare ask for work in the strip of neon-lit shawarma stands downtown, even though many were staffed by fellow refu­gees. If he was caught working, Waseem could be imprisoned, transferred to the refugee camps, where only the poorest of the poor live, or sent back to Syria. Still, he had to find a way to pay the $247 rent on the apartment he once shared with his parents. He and Noorhan relied increasingly on whatever Mahmoud could send back from America. Instead of helping to support his parents, he was taking from them. ‘‘My father used to be a wealthy man,’’ Waseem said, recalling Mahmoud’s locksmith business in Abu Dhabi. Once the war began, Mahmoud sold the business for $120,000. For nearly five years, that money supported more than a dozen family members in five different countries. Now the money was gone.

Among Syrian refugees, ‘‘on hold’’ is the most dreaded category. It is extremely difficult to get clear answers about why the hold has been applied or when it will be lifted. To try to learn more, Waseem designated The New York Times as a third party with the legal right to inquire about his case. In response to an email from The Times in November, the International Organization for Migration would say only that Waseem’s case ‘‘is currently on hold pending further review by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.’’

Officials cannot comment on individual cases, but when briefed on the case as a hypothetical, immigration officers and resettlement experts offered several possible explanations: It could be as simple as an applicant’s security clearance having expired while a family member waited to be vetted. Or maybe Waseem’s name sounds like a name on a terrorist watch-list. Or maybe, at the very last minute, ‘‘recurrent vetting’’ raised a red flag. Recurrent vetting, which began in 2015, checks names through a series of databases right up to when the flight lands in the United States. As a senior intelligence officer with the National Counterterrorism Center described it: ‘‘If you have an 800 credit score and you’re good for a new Visa card, and two weeks from now they find out that, hey, two years ago, you changed your name to cover up a prior bankruptcy, then they can take away that card.’’

Or maybe it was Azizeh’s brother. As a former military member of the Assad regime, he might still count as a black mark. Even though he defected early on, he could, by some bureaucratic oversight, still be designated a security risk to the United States. When reached in Qatar this fall, via Skype, he expressed relief that all of his family had made it out of Syria alive. He, too, was searching for a new country. ‘‘I’m not looking for beauty or history,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m looking for a country with human rights and freedom.’’ Other family members described specific questions regarding Azizeh’s brother posed to them by American immigration officers in Jordan. For example, did they serve him coffee or tea when he was in their homes? This was most likely a question to determine whether the family had provided material support — which could include a cup of coffee, a glass of water, a ride — to someone designated to be an enemy of the United States.

As months passed with no answers, Waseem turned over the strange questions he was asked during his final interview. Could these hold the key to the predicament in which he now found himself? Did he intend to commit terrorism in the United States? No. Did he intend to visit a prostitute in the United States? No. Refugees often refer to questions like the last one as ‘‘the crazy questions,’’ a senior immigration official told me: queries that, by law, immigration officials must ask to determine grounds of inadmissibility, even though they’re anachronistic. Others include Are you a member of the Nazi Party? and Are you a habitual drunkard?