Rozhan Rasti.

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{shortcode-7b0d78f749b7c9782f39de42e5139c59e2b30f27}ozhan Rasti speaks five languages, plays the violin and the santoor, and fills her free time with painting and photography. Like those of the 1,653 other students who chose to join Harvard College’s Class of 2029, her resumé shines — she ranked 15th in her country’s national college entrance exam and was a finalist in the English Language Olympiad.

But unlike her would-be classmates, Rasti will not be moving into a Harvard Yard dormitory or eating in Annenberg Hall this fall. The reason? She is a citizen of Iran, one of a dozen countries blacklisted under a travel ban signed by President Donald Trump in June.

Unlike the three travel bans enacted during Trump’s first term, which included exemptions for admitted students, the new restrictions have ensnared hundreds of aspiring scholars like Rasti.

With rumors of a revived ban swirling since Trump took office in January, Rasti moved quickly to begin the student visa process as soon as her Harvard acceptance arrived in March. She snagged the earliest available appointment for a visa interview — a late May slot at the U.S. embassy in Dubai — and was approved on the spot.

But before she could retrieve her visa, Trump’s order brought the process to a halt.

“Everything was going smoothly — I’d even booked flights,” Rasti said. “I was packing my bags. I was completely ready to get on a plane.”

Now, none of that is happening, Rasti said. While her classmates take their first steps through Harvard’s gates, she remains thousands of miles away — barred from stepping foot on campus.

And she is not alone. More than 100 Harvard students and scholars come from the 12 countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen — whose citizens are banned from entering the U.S. under Trump’s order, according to a June 7 email sent from the Harvard International Office to affected affiliates.

“As you know, the University is actively working to protect the rights of students and scholars from around the world to come to Harvard’s campus this summer and next academic year,” they wrote in the email. “We will continue to keep you informed as the situation evolves.”

But throughout the summer, Rasti said her messages to the HIO often went unanswered for weeks — and that when responses did arrive, they didn’t contain much useful information.

For the foreseeable future, she remains in Iran, at her home in Shiraz.

Not Harvard’s Fight

In the days after Trump’s June 4 travel ban, Rasti stayed calm. She remembered the uproar that had followed his first attempted ban in 2017, and was confident a legal battle would soon be underway.

“I was expecting people to do something about it,” Rasti said. “I saw that lawyers talked about how unfair it was, how unjust it was, how it was discriminatory.”

“But that’s as far as it went. Nobody did anything above just tweeting about it,” she added.

Instead, she said, the White House’s direct attacks on Harvard dominated the headlines. On June 4, the same day the 12-country travel ban was announced, Trump issued a separate presidential proclamation barring foreign students from entering the country to attend Harvard.

Harvard sued over the University-specific ban on June 5 and secured a temporary restraining order just hours later. The reprieve did not help students like Rasti, who was blocked because of her nationality, not her Harvard affiliation.

While pages of court filings mounted over the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard, no comparable legal push materialized against the broader, country-based travel ban.

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Trump’s first travel ban, issued in January 2017 and targeting seven Muslim-majority countries, blocked at least four Iranian scholars from entering the U.S. to research at Harvard. But after two states sued, the ban was quickly halted in court, and the Trump administration went back to the drawing board.

In March 2017, the White House issued a second travel ban that replaced the first. The new order exempted lawful permanent residents and current visa holders, and clarified case-by-case waivers — changes meant to address the legal defects cited by the courts.

The second ban, too, was halted by a federal judge just days after it was announced. This time, Harvard joined an amicus brief asking the courts to reject an attempt to overturn the block, arguing the ban would have “serious and chilling” effects on its students and faculty.

A third and final iteration of the ban came in September 2017, when the administration issued a proclamation restricting entry for citizens of eight countries. Unlike its predecessors, the ban was indefinite in duration and expanded to include certain non-Muslim countries in an effort to withstand further legal challenge. A court left the third ban in place, but it was repealed by the Biden administration.

By then, all four of the Iranian students who had been blocked from studying at Harvard had managed to enter the U.S.

Now, during Trump’s second term, Harvard has largely kept quiet on the 12-country travel ban. In June, a Harvard International Office staff member told Rasti via email that the University was too busy defending itself in court.

“Harvard isn’t specifically taking any legal action on the travel ban proclamation, as the university has several other suits pending right now,” the staff member wrote.

Rasti said she was frustrated, but she could understand why Harvard had focused on the University-specific travel ban.

“It worried all international students, not just one,” she said. “As far as I know, I am the only one who is an incoming student that is affected by this travel ban for countries.”

Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo declined to comment on Rasti’s circumstances, but wrote that the College is in “close contact with students as they prepare for the upcoming semester.”

Though Rasti may be the only incoming freshman affected by the policy, the HIO website shows that seven current students at the College hail from one of the 12 restricted countries. One doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health, Fatou Wurie, was blocked from returning to Harvard in June because she is from Sierra Leone, one of seven countries that face partial restrictions under the travel ban. Wurie will be able to complete her degree remotely — but may not be able to walk across a graduation stage next May.

Even outside of the travel ban, Harvard’s international students still face difficulty when traveling — despite the University’s recent legal victories. Harvard staff advised international students at a July information session to expect tight screening at Boston Logan International Airport and to be cautious about posting political messages online.

And in a June court filing, the HIO’s Director of Immigration Services Maureen Martin described how affiliates — including an Israeli professor and researchers from India, China, and Germany — faced heightened scrutiny and distress at the border following the June 4 proclamations, even after the ban on Harvard affiliates was temporarily halted.

But even as Harvard notched more and more legal wins securing its ability to host international students, Rasti watched from the sidelines with what seemed like no path forward.

“I was left with nowhere to go,” she said.

‘There Might Not Be Much Anybody Can Do’

Rasti said she first reached out to the HIO on May 30, hoping to prepare in case the rumors of a forthcoming travel ban proved true. But for nearly two weeks, she did not receive a reply.

“The HIO didn’t respond to me immediately. It took weeks for them to respond, and even then, they didn’t have much to say,” she said.

On June 12, an HIO officer sent Rasti the email informing her that Harvard would not pursue legal action against the travel ban.

The American Civil Liberties Union “and other similar organizations have mentioned action but I am not aware of any filings to date,” they wrote.

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Rasti, believing she would not receive help from the University, decided to take matters into her own hands and seek external guidance.

“I started looking into ways to overcome it legally,” she said, “because there is absolutely no evidence of Iranian students being any threat to national security.”

“I talked to the ACLU, I talked to many law firms across the U.S.,” she added. “The only lawyers that were available — the only lawyers that believed we had something to argue — they charge millions of dollars, which is impossible for anyone to pay.”

With little guidance from the HIO and few lawyers offering help, Rasti turned next to the Harvard Representation Initiative, emailing the Harvard Law School-based clinic on July 8 to ask for a consultation.

Eight days later, a staff member replied, writing that there was “very little” they would be able to do and urging Rasti to begin contemplating the possibility that she would be unable to attend Harvard.

“It could be difficult for you to obtain the visa and I would recommend considering contingency plans for other Universities outside of the United States,” they wrote.

The HRI staffer wrote that Rasti could try applying for a national interest exception, which allows individuals to bypass visa restrictions by demonstrating they would serve a critical United States national interest — though the HRI staffer cautioned that “it may be difficult” to meet the vague threshold, which is determined at the Secretary of State’s discretion.

“I am sorry that you are having to endure this. I know you worked very hard just to be admitted into Harvard,” the HRI staffer wrote. “However, the President’s broad level of authority to ban travel has previously been upheld by the Supreme Court and I worry that there might not be much anybody can do to overcome this travel ban.”

The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, which upheld the third iteration of the ban, ruled that the president has sweeping authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whenever their entry is deemed “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Trump’s fourth travel ban invoked the very same authority, section 212(f) of the INA, to bar citizens from a dozen countries. The 2018 precedent still looms, meaning it may be difficult for students like Rasti — or universities like Harvard — to mount a successful legal challenge.

“For those individuals, unless they have some reason to think that they were individually targeted for impermissible reasons, I think it’s going to be really hard for them to get around this,” said Paul A. Gowder, a Northwestern University professor who studies constitutional law.

Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that students whose requests for a national interest exception are denied could have grounds to challenge the outcome in court.

“Because the exception is to be interpreted so narrowly, that almost swallows up the exception itself,” he said. “So there’s certainly an argument to be made that in the universe where there's no process at all, it can hardly be argued that there’s procedural due process.”

Beyond the NIE clause, Joseph said that students and institutions could consider filing claims if they have proof that the travel ban was rooted in discrimination.

“There are potentially First Amendment and Establishment Clause claims that could be made if we could show that there was racial animus,” he said. “What I think Harvard and the students can do is exercise their rights in court.”

So far, Rasti hasn’t found anyone willing to take up a case against the ban.

‘It’s Worth Trying’

Rasti, who is 20, has looked forward to studying abroad since she was seven years old.

“I can’t be myself here,” she said. “I just wanted to be in a country where I could just focus on my studies and focus on my work.”

Rasti played on her high school’s badminton team. She learned three programming languages and then taught kids to code. She participated in Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which erupted in 2022 after the death of a young woman who was arrested by Iran’s morality police. She raised money to support underprivileged women’s education.

And she worked hard to further her own education, too. Since finishing high school in 2023, Rasti has spent nearly two years piecing together the materials necessary for an application to Harvard, where she hoped to study neuroscience and linguistics. She left Iran twice to sit for standardized tests — first the International English Language Testing System, then the SAT. She spent her savings on airfare and exam fees, she said.

Her efforts were finally rewarded in March when she checked the notification, at 4 a.m. in her local time zone, in her Harvard admissions portal.

“I opened up my.harvard and the screen just sprayed confetti into my face — and it was beautiful,” Rasti said. “I called my mom and I screamed, and I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to Harvard.’”

But nearly five months later, that dream has stalled — and Rasti said her future looks nothing like she imagined.

“I’m not sure what I want to do,” she said. “I wasn’t prepared for this, and this is my third gap year.”

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Before it became clear she wouldn’t make it to Harvard in time to start the school year, Rasti began making plans to start her new life in Cambridge. She booked flights, packed suitcases, and let go of her students at the language institute she founded after graduating high school.

After her conversations with officials from the HRI and HIO, Rasti contacted her admissions officer, who said she only had one option: to defer.

“I said that maybe I could start online, maybe I could do a study abroad, or do some remote work — do something until I figured it all out,” she said. “The only option they gave me was a deferral.”

Rasti said she appreciated the flexibility her admissions officer granted her, including by extending the deadline to defer until Sept. 2 — the first day of classes.

Before making any final decisions, Rasti said, she plans to apply for a national interest exception — with help from the HRI.

“At first they said that they couldn’t do anything for me,” she said. “But just a few days ago, they said that they could help me with the NIE.”

On August 14, the State Department declassified internal cables detailing the process through which NIE requests will be evaluated. Officials wrote in the cables, dated June 9, that NIEs “should be used rarely” and that routine travel — including for education — would not qualify.

“We all accept and agree that it’s impossible,” Rasti said. “But it’s worth trying.”

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.