At 10:05 on Friday morning, a young Iraqi couple named Khalas and Nada were trading panicked texts. Would Nada escape Iraq before President Trump’s executive order barring refugees took effect, or would Trump’s pen-stroke bring all their plans to ruin?

The day before was their second anniversary, but they couldn’t celebrate together: Khalas lives in Washington, D.C., and Nada in Sinjar, in the north of Iraq. Khalas, a former interpreter for the U.S. Army, was granted a Special Immigrant Visa for his service to America. He came last July, thinking that Nada would arrive shortly thereafter.

They are also Yazidis, members of a pre-Islamic religion whose adherents have been severely persecuted in recent years, particularly by the Islamic State.

Khalas had been to the U.S. four years earlier as part of a troupe of students from the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (A.U.I.S.), performing Shakespeare throughout the country. Khalas played Brutus in “Julius Caesar.” He would have been within his rights to claim asylum on that first trip, but he was still full of hope for the future in Iraq.

One of ten siblings, he grew up on a farm outside the Yazidi village of Khanasor, six miles from the Syrian border. His family had a small orchard, some sheep, and cows. They learned English by reading books and mastering vocabulary cards.

When the Americans invaded, he realized his language skills were needed. At eighteen, he became one of the youngest interpreters the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment ever had. At the time, there wasn’t a lethal stigma surrounding such work, especially within the Yazidi community. “Yazidis didn’t look at Americans as occupiers,” he told me. “If you were an interpreter, people would respect you more.”

Dispatched alongside troops patrolling the city of Tal Afar, he was fired upon constantly. On one mission, he accompanied U.S. soldiers door to door as they inquired about water quality—there were reports of a cholera outbreak in the area. Khalas and an American sergeant were questioning an Iraqi and his son at the front gate of their home when an insurgent opened fire with an assault rifle. The sergeant was hit in the legs, the boy was shot, and the father ran off. “It became chaos,” Khalas recalled. “The sergeant was falling down, so I took his weapon, which was jumping around. I put his hand on my shoulder and I dragged him into the house to protect ourselves.” He bandaged the sergeant’s legs while they waited for backup.

Later on in his service, Khalas was riding in convoy behind a Humvee that was hit by an I.E.D. Grenades began sailing in from a nearby village. “There was no place to protect ourselves,” Khalas said, ”but we had to take our friends who have died out of the Humvee.” He ran through the field of fire to help pry the bodies of three Americans from the wreckage.

He was shot once, but the bullet lodged between his Kevlar vest and torso and left only a small scar, so he didn’t think much of it.

After two years with the Americans, he went back to school. In his free time, he formed a group of young poets and travelled from village to village doing readings. Nada, who headed the local women’s union that hosted one of his events, asked Khalas out on a date. “I loved your poems,” she told the startled young man, “but I think I love you, not just the poems.”

In August, 2014, the Islamic State massacred Yazidis throughout the Sinjar mountain range. Khalas had an eight-thirty class at the American University in Sulaymaniyah the morning of the attack. During a break, he glanced at his phone and found forty missed calls.

“We are running from Sinjar,” his father shouted, when Khalas reached him. Half his siblings were fleeing to the city of Dohuk, the other half into the mountains. Their farm, which the family had held for generations, was destroyed by the Islamic State, whose militants killed five thousand Yazidis in the first wave. Thousands of women were enslaved; those that hid in the mountain faced starvation and dehydration. Three days after the attack, President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State to forestall a potential genocide of fifty thousand Yazidis.

The following month, Khalas and Nada applied for the Special Immigrant Visa. The program was created in 2008, with bipartisan support, to issue visas to twenty-five thousand Iraqis with ties to the U.S. I have been deeply involved in efforts to help these Iraqis, founding the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, in 2007. I formerly coördinated the reconstruction of Fallujah for U.S.A.I.D., and personally lost colleagues to assassins’ bullets. Khalas and Nada contacted Marcia Maack, the director of pro-bono activities for the law firm Mayer Brown, the primary legal partner to the List Project, who agreed to take on their cases. (I became involved in their cases through the List Project.)

As his application wound through the gears of the U.S. bureaucracy, Khalas was required to submit documentation to prove that he was, in fact, an interpreter. He had a handful of dated commendation letters from several years earlier, but Maack located his commanding officers and requested new letters of support.

Major Kevin Martin, U.S. Army Reserve, wrote a letter describing Khalas’s “exceptional performance” as an interpreter. A few weeks later, Major Russell Washington, of the D.C. National Guard, stressed that Khalas had “provided faithful and valuable service to the US Government, and like the other interpreters, faced threat as a result of their employment and association with the United States military . . . it is my opinion he does not pose a threat to the national security or safety of the United States.”

The screening process was arduous and slow-moving, but they were optimistic.

In January, 2015, Khalas and Nada were married. In May, they received their Chief of Mission approval letter, a critical step in the visa process, setting them up for background checks and interviews with agents from the Department of Homeland Security.

That summer, Khalas earned a degree in business, graduating as valedictorian of his class. In his commencement speech, he said, “It saddens me to remember that many of us are moving back to tents or cities far from our homes.”

That fall, Khalas and Nada had their first security interview. They were told to wait.

In April, 2016, eighteen months after applying, Khalas received his visa. With his performance at A.U.I.S., he was offered scholarships to remain for graduate studies, but he wanted to earn an American M.B.A. He dreamed of returning to Sinjar one day to start a private school. He was given until October to travel to the U.S.

But there was a problem: Nada was still waiting. U.S. visa laws are inflexible, unconcerned with nuance, and annoyed by complexity. He could request an extension, but there would be no guarantees. His might expire, while hers was approved. Maack urged him to come to the U.S., confident that Nada would receive her visa soon.

Two months before the Presidential election, her visa was tentatively approved, pending a routine medical examination. She had a slight flu during the checkup, and, for reasons that she doesn’t understand, was told that it would take at least three months to process her results.