A Syrian tries to make it back to Virginia

Despite the chaos at airports around the world on Saturday, some travelers from the affected countries, desperate to get back to their families, still tested their luck on Sunday, hoping that the restrictions had somehow eased.

One of them, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian academic and human rights activist who has lived in the United States since 2007, was making the journey home from Turkey, unsure whether his immigration status – a category called “temporary protected status,” and granted to people who cannot return to their home countries because of conflict or other disaster – was exempt from the new rules, he said in an interview.

He had left the United States on Jan. 23 for Turkey, before President Trump signed the executive order banning refugees, migrants and others from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and he had left his wife and three children in Virginia. As he prepared to return, he contacted the Department of Homeland Security, but they were of little help, with one official telling him that they were not sure whether he would be among those barred from entry, and another suggesting he contact his embassy in Turkey.

Now he is one of countless people around the world whose lives were thrown into uncertainty this weekend by Trump’s action.

So Ziadeh, who is currently an analyst at the Arab Center in Washington, and has held visiting scholar posts at Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown, went to Istanbul airport anyhow, and once there, counted at least 108 people, mostly from Yemen or Iraq, who were prevented from boarding U.S.-bound planes, he said. On Sunday afternoon, he was allowed to board a Turkish Airways flight bound for Frankfurt, and was briefly stopped by German police when he arrived and then released after convincing them that his documentation was the equivalent of a green card.

There were three hours to go until his flight to Dulles, where his attorney was waiting with a small group of people, to receive him, in a potentially useful show of support amid all the uncertainty. “I am not sure if this will help,” Ziadeh wrote in a text message.