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It took thousands of dollars and reams of paperwork, but in late December, more than a year after his marriage, Omid Moghimi received word that his wife's visa interview had a date: Thursday, Feb. 2.

"We were very excited," Moghimi said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "It was the light at the end of the tunnel. We were making plans about what we were going to do when we got here."

Moghimi, a resident in internal medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, was born in the United States, grew up in Iran and holds citizenship in both countries.

His Iranian wife, Dorsa Razi (in Iran, married women keep their surnames), was a childhood friend, and after a reconnection and a courtship in recent years, they were married.

A month after their legal union, in July 2015, her residency application began.

The process lasted through the date of their formal wedding the following April, which they had pushed back in anticipation of the immigration process, and through their honeymoon in India.

It lasted through the summer of 2016, as the presidential election campaign raged and then-candidate Donald Trump reiterated his promise to ban Muslims from entering the country.

Finally, after stacks of documents and months of waiting, the U.S. Consulate in Abu Dhabi -- there is no American embassy in Iran -- scheduled for Razi what was likely to be her final appointment on Thursday.

Then came last Friday, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that temporarily bars immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Iran.

"Your interview has been canceled," the consulate wrote back to Moghimi and Razi the next day, "and we will notify you if and when it will be rescheduled."

Razi is still in the United Arab Emirates, and she and Moghimi have been left in limbo, wondering whether they should wait for the 90-day order to expire -- or scrap their plans altogether.

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