Iranian granted U.S. visa to aid brother with cancer despite travel ban

[March 30, 2018]  By Mica Rosenberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department granted a visa to a man in Iran hoping to donate bone marrow to his U.S. citizen brother with blood cancer, obtaining a rare waiver to President Donald Trump's travel ban, the family's lawyer said on Thursday.

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.

The State Department through a spokeswoman said it was unable to comment on a specific visa case.

Trump's travel ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed to go into effect on Dec. 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.

Patient Maziar Hashemi (L), who has the cancer Myelodysplastic syndrome, and his wife Fereshteh talk after meeting with his transplant doctor at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., March 26, 2018. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

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 are stuck, also with urgent cases, with no idea what is happening."

(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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