The new Trump travel ban announced Monday has Dr. Khaled Almilaji working on a "Plan B" to reunite elsewhere with his pregnant wife, whom he has not seen since the first executive order in January marooned him in Turkey while he was working on his humanitarian project.

Stranded in Turkey since January, Syrian physician Dr. Khaled Almilaji lost hope Monday that he will obtain a new student visa and return to finish his Brown University master's degree work in public health, given President Donald Trump's new revised travel ban.

Almilaji, 35, also holds out little hope of reuniting in the United States with his pregnant wife, Dr. Jehan Mouhsen, who is staying with friends in New York.

Instead, he may opt for "Plan B," reuniting with Mouhsen in Canada and pursing a Master of Health Informatics at the University of Toronto. He is waiting to hear on a scholarship.

On Monday, Trump signed a new travel ban that imposes a 90-day ban on the issuance of new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim nations, including Syria.

"This executive order today stops any hope that I can get out on another visa, in at least the next three months," Almilaji said in a phone interview from Gaziantep, Turkey. Beyond that, he may not press his luck: "There could be more restrictions."

But happy news tempered the bad on Monday.

Mouhsen had just found out the baby's gender. During the phone interview, Almilaji received a text with a photo of a pair of bright pink Baby Gap shoes.

"So it will be a girl!" Almilaji exclaimed. "That's why I feel not so upset today."

Mouhsen, whose baby is due in August, said in a phone interview that the combination of being away from her husband and suffering three months of morning sickness "was one of the hardest times I have had."

She added, "For me, the most important thing is to see him, to be with him. If Canada is the solution, of course, I'll be happy for any plan to make us be together again."

The couple have been in constant communication, including through video calls. Mouhsen's morning sickness appears to have passed; she is feeling well enough to resume studying for her medical boards in the U.S.

Before coming to Brown, Almilaji had been arrested, tortured and jailed for six months early in the civil war in Syria. Freed in 2011 when jails grew too crowded, Almilaji fled to Turkey, where he coordinated efforts to set up underground hospitals in Syria to provide care for people in rebel-held territories.

In 2014, he coordinated vaccination of more than 1 million Syrian children against polio, as the disease was making a comeback in the war-ravaged country.

He came to Brown on full scholarship last fall. On Jan. 1, Almilaji left the States to check on his ongoing humanitarian project in Turkey. But when he attempted to fly back to the U.S., Turkish Airlines informed him his student visa had been revoked — before Trump even took office.

Almilaji still remains puzzled as to why, since the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul "accepted my new application."

NBC News reported on Jan. 28 that U.S. immigration officials had been revoking visas for weeks — including at least 40 student visas — before Trump signed his first travel-ban executive order.

Dr. Terrie Fox Wetle, dean of Brown's School of Public Health, emailed Monday: "We value and respect Khaled Almilaji and the humanitarian work he had done. He is a beloved member of the School of Public Health community and we have worked hard to help him return to Brown to complete his MPH studies. I am concerned that the new executive order will make his timely return to us very difficult.

"Although we hope he can come back to us, we are also working to help him find another public health program to finish his degree," she wrote.

Meanwhile, colleagues have been circulating a petition requesting that the U.S. Consular Section in Turkey "immediately re-issue Dr. Khaled Almilaji's student visa so that he can join his wife and classmates."

Fellow Brown classmate Andriy Chybisov said more than 2,300 people have signed the petition, among them representatives from 45 academic institutions, including "a large medical community both here in Rhode Island and in other states." Many people from outside academia and medicine have also signed.

Chybisov said, "Now that the new executive order has been signed, it is hard to predict how the situation is going to unfold; we do keep the petition open for signatures in hopes for another court ruling that would cancel the order."

Chyvisov said that when he met Khaled in September 2015 at Brown's School of Public Health, "I was impressed with his determination to apply what he would learn here to the work he was doing in humanitarian relief ..."

Chybisov called Almilaji's possible transfer to a Canadian university "a heavy loss for America's reputation as the foundation of democracy and human rights. At the same time, it is a great gain for Canada, because Dr. Almilaji is destined to make significant contribution to humanitarian response research, and any public health school will be proud to have him."

— kziner@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @karenleez