Hamdiyah Al Saeedi

Detained en route to meeting her son, stationed at Fort Bragg

Had all gone according to plan, after an overnight flight from Doha, Qatar, Hamdiyah Al Saeedi, 65, would have landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on Saturday and then boarded a connecting flight to Raleigh, N.C., to meet her son Ali Alsaeedy, whom she had not seen in five years.

It was not by chance that her new life as an American immigrant would begin in North Carolina. Her son is a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, which is based at Fort Bragg.

When she did not show up at the airport, Sgt. Alsaeedy’s immediate fear was that his mother, who does not speak English, had somehow gotten lost.

He flew to New York, where another reality awaited him. His mother was not lost: She was being held somewhere in Terminal 4 by authorities who were threatening to deport her. “They wouldn’t even let me see her,” Sgt. Alsaeedy, a newly minted American citizen, said by phone on Sunday morning from the airport, where he was still waiting for his mother.

A native of Baghdad, Sgt. Alsaeedy has been working for the American government for much of his life. After the 2003 invasion, he was an interpreter for seven years, working for the American military and the United States Agency for International Development. For his service, he eventually received a special immigrant visa and emigrated to the United States.

He joined the Army and returned to Iraq in 2015, this time as a United States soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division. “I cannot tell you what I was doing,” he said when asked about his role. All he would say was this: “The mission we were doing there, I was a part of it.”

For years, he had been filling out endless forms so that his mother and his father could join him in America. “I started the process five years ago to bring both parents to this country,” Sgt. Alsaeedy said.

In December, his father died. A few weeks later, his mother’s visa was approved. He immediately booked a flight for her. At the moment that the president signed the immigration order, at 4:42 p.m. in Washington on Friday, she was probably waiting to board her flight in Doha.

When Sgt. Alsaeedy arrived at J.F.K. searching for his mother on Saturday, other families were waiting at the airport with similar stories. With the help of lawyers, he filed a habeas petition for her release. And his morale was buoyed by the swelling protests outside.

“This country is great because of those people, the thousands outside who were protesting and helping people with whom they have no relation,” Sgt. Alsaeedy said. “Even in my worst situation, I felt hope and freedom and that there are great people.”

But even as the protests were occurring, Sgt. Alsaeedy received a phone call with crushing news. A federal agent told him that his mother would be deported on a flight bound for Germany around 9 p.m. The agent offered to put Sgt. Alsaeedy’s mother on the phone to say goodbye. She was crying.

“I was hoping to see you and hug your child,” she said, according to Sgt. Alsaeedy, who said he was stunned, unsure what to say.

“It’s not over,” he said, hoping to calm her down.

In the end, his mother was not deported. She was held for more than 33 hours, handcuffed for some of the time, and was denied a wheelchair, according to a lawyer for Sgt. Alsaeedy, Molly Lauterback of Brooklyn Defender Services. They were reunited at J.F.K. after 4 p.m. on Sunday.

— Joseph Goldstein