Raabyaah Althaibani and Basheer Othman met during Yemen’s Arab spring, and face uncertain future as Althaibani waits in the US for her husband to join her

Raabyaah Althaibani and her family were plunged into uncertainty again on Monday as Donald Trump signed his new executive order banning travel from six Muslim-majority countries. Althaibani, a Yemeni American, is now unsure about the fate of her husband’s visa application to join her in the US.

“This executive order has affected thousands of Yemeni American New Yorkers, including myself and my family,” Althaibani said. “I don’t know what will happen with this ban, but what I do know is I want my husband here with me.”

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“It’s already difficult to be in this long distance and then to have your government add this burden, it’s inhumane,” she told reporters at the offices of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Althaibani was one of the many people who took to the streets and protested against Trump’s original travel ban at JFK international airport and has been organizing ever since the first order was passed.

The new travel ban signed on Monday is a modification of the more sweeping executive order signed on 27 January. In a move to make the ban more palatable for the courts – after a stay was placed on the original executive order – the new executive order omits Iraq from the list of countries, leaving Iran, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Several exceptions were also explicitly added such as legal permanent residents and current visa holders. And the new order includes a 10-day delay to avoid the chaos and confusion that ensued in the days after Trump signed the original.

But Trump’s order still blocks citizens from the six remaining countries from visiting the United States for 90 days and places a hold on refugees coming into the country for 120 days.

The new language provided no respite for Althaibani.

She met her husband, Basheer Othman, in 2010 during the Arab spring in Yemen, and the two got engaged in 2015. Othman is an independent journalist and director of the Yemeni Institute for Social Studies, who left Yemen at the end of December 2015 as he feared for his life.

The country has come under severe aerial bombardment from Saudi Arabia and its allies since – with the support of the US – March 2015, when former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi was ousted from the government. The situation was increasingly difficult for independent journalists so Othman traveled to the south of Yemen and boarded a boat to Djibouti before relocating to Goa, India.

“He left Yemen because of a war that we [the United States] are directly involved in,” Althaibani said. “If you don’t want refugees, stop creating them.”

The two were married in India in January 2016 and Althaibani returned to the US and began a petition to reunite with him. They completed the first major hurdle of the process in November 2016 when his I-130, the first step for a US citizen to bring a spouse to the United States that includes rigorous vetting, was approved.

However, the signing of Trump’s executive order in January put their future in question.

“I cried myself to sleep that night,” Althaibani told the Guardian. “We’ve already been apart for so long it was difficult.

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“But I woke up the next morning ready to fight.”

She spent the days following the original ban organizing and attending protests and was one of the architects behind the Yemeni bodega strike – where the thousands of bodega store owners in New York shut their stores for eight hours in protest of Trump’s executive order.

Althaibani said the first executive order brought flashbacks to fear felt in the post-9/11 era by thousands of Yemenis living in New York, but seeing thousands of people demonstrate in support of refugees and immigrants was encouragement to hold their own rally.

Sirine Shebaya, a lawyer who helped organized the Dulles Justice Coalition after the original ban to help those affected, said the emotional burden of the ban on many communities is its most lasting damage.

“There are people who are now in terror and afraid,” Shebaya said. “That’s a lasting effect that continued all throughout the court’s phase, that’s something that is going to be very hard to repair.”