Fourteen-year-old Dhakhil had been so badly injured at an Iraqi refugee camp that physicians thought his leg would need to be amputated. But thanks to a team of surgeons in Boston, the Yazidi teenager will be able to walk again.

The operation to repair Dhakhil’s badly shattered leg nearly didn’t happen because of Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

“He arrived 48 hours before the ban,” Carrie Schuchardt, Dhakhil’s caretaker in the US, told the Guardian. “And we know if he had come to [Boston’s] Logan airport on the Friday instead of the Wednesday, there is a good chance he would have been turned away. He would have lost his leg, possibly his life.”

On 27 January, Trump banned refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. People who were banned included dozens of patients who had been screened and were set to receive urgent medical care at the country’s top hospitals.

The White House didn’t show the federal agencies that oversee immigration the order before it was signed into law, causing chaos at airports around the world. The order was temporarily stayed the next night, but confusion lingered until an appellate court blocked enforcement of the order last week.

That court’s decision may have saved lives.

Before the travel ban was halted, the Cleveland Clinic said it had nine patients scheduled to travel from the affected countries to the US for medical care, while Johns Hopkins had at least 11 patients scheduled to receive treatment who were affected by the ban.

“These are very, very ill patients,” Pamela Paulk, president of Johns Hopkins Medicine International, told Stat, a US health news website. “In most cases, these are not cases to be postponed.”

In a statement, the Mayo Clinic medical facility said: “We have several patients who would have needed to cancel or delay their appointments at Mayo Clinic if the order had not been challenged by the courts.”



The Mayo Clinic said that it also knew of 80 staff, physicians and scholars affiliated with the medical system who were affected by the order. “We have brought expertise from legal, government relations and human resources to help with individual cases as needed,” the statement said.

The hospitals would not disclose the status of the patients on Tuesday.

This is, in part, because of the uncertainty about the White House’s next move on immigration. The administration supports strict immigration policies and has said it will challenge the court order blocking its travel ban.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said the administration was “reviewing all of our options in the court system” to win the legal battle, and Trump said he was considering a “brand new” executive order on immigration.

Trump’s sweeping travel ban included members of the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq, who were subjected to what the United Nations classified as genocide when Isis militants overran their homes in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, killing and enslaving thousands of women and girls.

Many Yazidis, such as Dhakhil, still live in refugee camps, where there is rarely electricity, limiting access to surgical care. The limited resources in the camps can make it difficult to adequately treat everything from broken bones to chronic conditions.

American hospitals have helped these refugees and countless others abroad who have limited access to high-quality medical care.

Schuchardt, who with her husband, John, has housed hundreds of refugees in Massachusetts at the House of Peace, is alarmed by the prospect of a new immigration executive order.

For the past 10 years, most of the refugees housed at House of Peace have been children from war zones in the Middle East who are scheduled to receive medical treatment in Boston hospitals.

House of Peace has welcomed children who lost limbs in car bombings, incurred serious burns in other explosions and suffered depleted uranium poisoning in Fallujah. The children often have to return to the US multiple times for follow-up burn treatment or to get new prosthetics.

Schuchardt said the children return to refugee camps or towns in war zones with a message: “In America, there is healing.”

But because of the uncertainty about the administration’s immigration policy plans, staff at House of Peace are worried about two young girls from Iraq and Syria who travelled to Massachusetts for burn treatment last year and will need to return for further care. “We’re deeply concerned that they won’t be allowed back in,” she said.

Schuchardt hopes the messages resonated at a meeting with congressional staffers on Tuesday afternoon in Washington DC. She spoke at the briefing, which was sponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal and hosted by Amnesty International, Church World Service and Human Rights First to show the impact of the travel ban.

Schuchardt was encouraged by travel ban protests and thought it was possible that citizens’ concern about other people’s suffering could “overcome what is coming out of Washington at this point”.

“We really feel a surge of conscience in this country that we haven’t experienced in a very long time,” she said.

Next week, House of Peace will welcome a Yazidi boy, Dilbreen. He has been in the US without his family for months after receiving treatment for burns he suffered after a heater exploded in the Iraqi refugee camp where he was staying.

His father traveled to the US for his son’s first round of treatment – when Schuchardt met the family – but had to return to Iraq for the birth of Dilbreen’s brother, who was named Trump in honor of his election night birth.

Dilbreen stayed with a Yazidi community in Michigan while waiting for his next treatment at Shriner’s Hospital in Boston, but his parents were prevented from entering the country and doctors had to postpone a critical eye surgery because they could not enter. “They were suffering enormous grief that they would not see Dilbreen again,” Schuchardt said.

But last week, after sustained protest and the courts’ intervention, the family was called to the American consulate, where they all received visas, even the new baby.

They are set to travel to Boston next week.