January 22, 2021
The US State Department has granted a rare visa to an Iranian to allow him into the United States to donate bone marrow to his US citizen brother, who has blood cancer.
The visa is a rare waiver to President Donald Trump’s visa ban, the family’s lawyer said.
Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer based in Massachusetts, said she received a call on Thursday from the consulate in Yerevan, Armenia, where Kamiar Hashemi had applied for a visa in February after he learned he was a rare 100 percent match for a transplant that could potentially save his brother’s life.
The status of the visa application was “refused” on the Department’s website but Khanbabai said she was told on the call that a waiver had been granted, two days after Reuters first reported on the case, and that Hashemi should make arrangements to travel to Armenia to pick it up.
Trump’s visa ban, which the US Supreme Court allowed to go into effect December 8 after months of legal wrangling, puts permanent bars on most travelers to the United States from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea, as well as certain government officials from Venezuela. Although the ban allows for case-by-case waivers to be granted, attorneys and applicants say the process is opaque with few clear guidelines on how to apply and why waivers are, or are not, granted.
Since the ban took effect, the State Department told Reuters more than 375 waivers have been approved, but declined to say for which countries and out of how many applications.
“It’s unfortunate that so much effort had to go into getting just one, clearly urgent, visa approved,” said Khanbabai. “There are thousands of people who are stuck, also with urgent cases, with no idea what is happening.”