Many families from the Muslim-majority countries will not be reunited in America. Iran will take a large hit. Venezuela and North Korea — not so much.
To President Trump’s supporters, the Supreme Court decision upholding his travel ban from seven countries — five with Muslim majorities — was an affirmation by the highest court in the land of his right to secure America’s borders and protect it from terrorism.
To opponents, the ruling validated an anti-Muslim agenda that betrayed American ideals, subverted the Constitution and upended the hopes of thousands of families separated by war and deprivation.
Here are three outcomes of the decision, which bans or severely restricts entry into the United States by people from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
The ruling sends a blunt message of rejection to visa seekers from some of the most destitute and dysfunctional countries. Immigration and civil-rights lawyers fear that it slams the door on many desperate people from the Muslim-majority countries that were affected, particularly those with relatives in the United States, who saw the Supreme Court as their last hope.
The timing of the ruling, as European Union countries are toughening policies toward refugees and asylum seekers, reinforced an atmosphere of a Western backlash to migrants, even as the global population of forcibly displaced people grows.
Three of the Muslim-majority countries affected by Mr. Trump’s order — Libya, Yemen and Syria — have known only war for years. A fourth, Somalia, has suffered through varying degrees of mayhem for decades. While antiterrorism experts consider the countries to be breeding grounds for violent extremism, the Supreme Court’s ruling will do nothing to hasten the end of the underlying conflicts there.
Although Mr. Trump’s executive order allows for granting exceptions on a case-by-case basis, lawyers said they had seen little or no evidence of such a process. Hundreds of Yemeni families with American relatives, for example, who have fled to Djibouti, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, to file waiver applications for visas because the United States Embassy in Yemen is closed, have been summarily denied waivers and remain stranded there.
“All of them were hanging their hopes on the Supreme Court decision,” said Diala Shamas, a staff lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based advocacy group that sent investigators to Djibouti and produced a report with the Rule of Law Clinic at Yale Law School about the stranded families.
“All of those people who were holding their breath are now facing the difficult choice of either permanent separation from their families or returning to Yemen,” she said.
Mohamud Noor, a Somali-American activist in the Minneapolis area, home to one of the largest Somali immigrant communities, said the Supreme Court decision was devastating to many who wanted relatives in their homeland to legally join them.
“I think we were expecting the Supreme Court would stand on moral grounds,” Mr. Noor said. “We live in America. This is a land of immigrants.”
The Muslim-majority country facing the most disruption is Iran, which historically has led the others in nonimmigrant visas to the United States, despite the estrangement in relations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
By some estimates one million American citizens of Iranian descent live in the United States, and many have traveled to Iran for family visits. But it is difficult to see how their Iran-based relatives can visit them.
Fear first rippled through the Iranian-American community with Mr. Trump’s initial iteration of a travel ban 18 months ago, which caused chaos in its disorganized rollout and was blocked by the courts.
But the angst has returned with the latest iteration, especially now that it has been validated by the Supreme Court, said Jamal Abdi, vice president of policy at the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based advocacy group.
“Iranians cannot travel here unless they get a waiver. The waiver process is unpredictable, with no explanation of how it will be implemented,” he said. “So there is extreme uncertainty. I think a lot of people are living with this.”
The impact is likely to further anger Iran’s hard-line opponents to Mr. Trump as he has moved to isolate the country. Iran already is feeling the ill effects of Mr. Trump’s decision last month to withdraw the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement and reimpose economic sanctions, which penalize businesses in other countries for doing business with Iran.
The Supreme Court decision came the same day the State Department said it expected all countries to cut their imports of Iranian oil to zero under the reimposed sanctions that take effect in November.
The practical effects on the two non-Muslim majority nations on Mr. Trump’s travel ban — Venezuela and North Korea — are minimal, lending weight to critics who said their inclusion was meant to mask what was essentially a ban that affected Muslims.
The restrictions on Venezuelans apply only to a narrow category of government officials deemed responsible for failing to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security in identifying visa seekers who are security risks.
While the restrictions on North Koreans apply to all, there are hardly any who are allowed by their government to come to the United States.
“Most people have forgotten that North Korea was added to the list of countries subject to the ban, mostly as a way of making it look less like an anti-Muslim measure,” said Evans J. R. Revere, a former State Department diplomat who is an expert on North Korea.
While North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, may regard North Korea’s inclusion on the travel ban as an unfriendly act, he is far more concerned with all of the other sanctions imposed on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile development.
Mr. Trump, who met with Mr. Kim at a groundbreaking summit meeting in Singapore on June 12, has said the North Korean leader is committed to denuclearization, but large questions remain over how, when or even whether it will happen.
