IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE NEEDED TO BE ASHAMED OF AMERICA:

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.

HuffPost collected data throughout 2021 on people who have been affected by the Trump-era travel ban, which included reaching out to American organizations that work with Muslim communities, putting out open calls on social media, and contacting lawyers and activists. An abridged and anonymized version of our data lives here, and our charts were built with Datawrapper.

The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs published monthly and quarterly reports after the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, which included cumulative data on versions of the ban that were implemented between Dec. 8, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021. However, that data is somewhat limited because it does not show monthly breakdowns of denials in 2017 and 2018.

The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs tallied 41,876 visas denied between December 2017 and January 2021, but no single agency or organization has collected comprehensive data on how tens of thousands of people, many of whom were American Muslims, were affected. But over the last year, HuffPost collected 874 stories of people who, like Saleh, are still feeling the impact of Trump's travel ban five years later.

In an attempt to account for the ban's far-reaching implications, HuffPost spoke to lawyers, immigration groups and advocacy organizations; interviewed dozens of families; and sifted through nearly a hundred lawsuits. These numbers are not comprehensive due to legal and practical limitations -- including the fact that not all impacted individuals could or did seek legal help -- but the analysis is the first of its kind and provides an in-depth glimpse into the physical, mental and economic toll of those denials.

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