BOSTON — Dozens of U.S. colleges are opposing President Donald Trump’s sweeping travel ban that has left some students and professors stranded abroad.
The presidents of several universities on Sunday issued scathing attacks of Trump’s executive order halting immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations. Many said it is already disrupting research and academics for their scholars, while some suggested they would defy the ban as far as legally possible.
The Association of American Universities, which represents 62 schools, urged Trump to reverse the order and said it will only steer top scholars to countries that compete with the United States.
Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University and a former Republican governor of Indiana, called the order “a bad idea, poorly implemented,” and called on Trump to revoke it.
The ban, which blocks immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, has been put on hold after federal judges in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington state stepped in. But some students and scholars from those countries remain caught in legal limbo, stranded while traveling abroad or visiting home during the recent holiday break.
Ata Anzali, an assistant professor of religion at Vermont’s Middlebury College, has been living in his home country of Iran since last summer to conduct research. His family booked flights that would have brought them back to the U.S. just before noon Sunday, but Anzali changed his mind at the last minute. He said he canceled two flights because he feared his children might get snarled by the travel ban.
“I don’t want my kids to go through this traumatic experience of being detained or deported,” Anzali told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Iran. “This is causing so much confusion, what are we supposed to do?”
