Update: Jan. 29, 2017, 3:55 p.m.
Vahideh Rasekhi was released from detention at JFK Airport on Sunday at around 2:30 p.m., Newsday has reported.
In an email to the campus community, Stony Brook University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. advised that students from the seven countries affected by the travel ban not to travel outside the United States “unless absolutely necessary.”
Update: Jan. 29, 2017, 10:46 a.m.
Vahideh Rasekhi was pulled from a flight to Ukraine Saturday night after a federal judge issued a stay against President Trump’s travel ban, The New York Daily News has reported.
The plane was set to travel to Istanbul through Kiev, and it departed around 2 a.m. without Rasekhi. She is still being detained at the JFK Airport.
The Graduate Student Organization has issued a statement about the situation on Facebook.
“We stand by Vahideh, our President, in her right to stay in this country and continue her education,” the statement reads.
Update: Jan. 29, 2017, 12:21 a.m.
Although BBC Persian journalist Bahman Kalbasi reported that Vahideh Rasekhi was scheduled to be deported at 11:40 p.m., it is unclear whether she left the country on the flight to Istanbul.
Stony Brook graduate student and Graduate Student Organization President Vahideh Rasekhi was reportedly detained at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport in Queens on Saturday under President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers from several predominately Muslim countries from entering the United States, according to the Three Village Patch.
Rasekhi had spent her winter break in Iran before returning to the U.S., the Three Village Patch reported. BBC Persian journalist Bahman Kalbasi also confirmed news of Rasekhi’s detainment in a tweet earlier today. A follow-up tweet reports that she was scheduled to be deported to Istanbul at 11:40 p.m.
Despite the stay order Vahideh Rasekhi is being deported on an 11:40 PM flight from JFK to Istanbul. #MuslimBan https://t.co/W6Y7mq1mnV
— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) January 29, 2017
President Trump’s Jan. 27 order restricts citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries including Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen from entering the United States.
The Three Village Patch reported that a 32-year-old SBU graduate named Sahar, who declined to give her last name, was also barred from seeing her parents at JFK, after their flight from Iran landed on U.S. soil.
When the story first broke, Turkish Airlines notified Sahar’s parents’ attorneys that her parents had been placed on an 11 p.m. flight back to Iran. Attorneys with the International Refugee Assistance Project filed a swift habeas petition on behalf of the couple in Brooklyn federal court, and on behalf of more than a dozen others, according to the Three Village Patch.
A federal judge in Brooklyn issued an emergency stay against the order, allowing people who have landed in the U.S. with a valid visa to remain – temporarily.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
