  Mohammed Saleh never got a chance to say goodbye to his son.
In 2018, Saleh petitioned for a visa so his son — Ayman, who lived in Aden, Yemen, and was 20 at the time — could come to the United States to seek treatment for a congenital heart condition. He wanted to hold Ayman, take him to his doctor appointments, and give him a chance at life. That opportunity didn’t exist in Yemen, where less than half of all health facilities were functioning after years of civil war.
The last time Saleh saw his son was during a visit to Yemen in June 2019. He still hoped then they could reunite in New York, where Saleh has lived for nearly three decades.
But then-President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, issued in January 2017, meant Ayman’s visa application was delayed indefinitely. Saleh begged lawyers and advocates for help, but the ban made legal recourse all but impossible.
Ayman’s application was still being processed when he died at a Yemeni hospital in May 2021, during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.
A year-long HuffPost investigation found hundreds of cases of Trump’s ban changing the lives of Muslims, both inside the United States and around the world. Families have been ripped apart. Educational and employment opportunities have been denied, maybe forever. People have missed milestones like birthdays, funerals and weddings. Some gave up on coming to the U.S. and instead relocated to another country, while others have been trapped in war zones.
 In his first interview since the violent Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman discussed his own experience as people stormed the building and reflected on life following the harrowing events. “It could have easily been a bloodbath so kudos to everybody there that showed a measure of restraint with regards to deadly force,” Goodman, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, said on an episode of the “3 Brothers No Sense” podcast. As Joe Biden campaigned for president pushing gun control, the United States was passing a grim milestone: the most firearm deaths recorded in a single year since systematic tracking began. More than 45,000 people were shot to death in 2020, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released late last month. The agency has yet to publish last year’s figures, but the spike in gun violence that started alongside the pandemic continued to increase in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent tracker. But while gun deaths kept climbing, Biden’s reform efforts have sputtered, leaving some advocates wondering whether he’ll miss the best window for passing significant reform. 
 Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? — Subscribe here!
©2021 HuffPost BuzzFeed, Inc 111 E 18th St, 13th Floor, New York, NY 10003 You are receiving this email because you signed up for updates
| |||||||||||||||||