Some detainees at airports are released

Travelers being held at airports around the country continued to be released on Sunday, while some had already been sent back and others were not allowed onto their flights to the United States.

The number of people still in custody at Kennedy Airport was a floating target on Sunday night. Rep. Joe Crowley, a Queens Democrat, said that based on his meeting with a Customs and Border Protection agent that concluded at around 8 p.m., six people were still being held at the airport’s Terminal 1.

All six have green cards, he said, and will be processed and released under terms of the judicial stay within a few hours. Five of the six are from a single flight from Turkey. Crowley said he did not know the flight on which the sixth arrived.

Crowley called the executive order “horrible and immoral.”

But a lawyer organizing aid for detainees and their families said that as many as 52 people had been detained at the airport over the weekend, based on contact with families and other sources. As many as 20 were still detained and two had been deported as of Sunday evening, she said. — SEAN PICCOLI

Yassin Abdelrhman, 76, was embraced by his son, Mohammed Suliman, 37, at Kennedy Airport to cheers from onlookers that included a scrum of pro bono lawyers on Sunday. Mr. Suliman, a British citizen, had traveled to Sudan to bring his father to the United States. But while Mr. Suliman was allowed to enter the country, his father had been detained since 8 a.m. on Saturday. “I am so tired,” Mr. Suliman said. “It has been a long journey.” His father did not speak. — RUTH BASHINSKY

Samira Asgari, 30, an Iranian citizen who was scheduled to fly to Boston on Saturday morning to start a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, was told in Frankfurt on Saturday that she could not board the plane. “I was pretty excited to join @soumya_boston’s lab but denied boarding due to my Iranian nationality,” she posted on Twitter. “Feeling safer?” Dr. Asgari had recently completed her Ph.D. in Switzerland and was planning to study the genetic roots of why people respond differently to tuberculosis infections. – AMY HARMON

Iman Hussain, 50, was reunited with her two daughters, Elaf, 25, and Anfal, 23, at Kennedy Airport after being detained for more than 30 hours. Elaf Hussain said her mother, who lived in Baghdad, had applied for a green card two years ago and it finally came though on Jan. 16. — RUTH BASHINSKY