We called it, half-jokingly, our Iran-Iraq friendship dinner. It was a party we threw in 2007 for friends my husband and I had made through our reporting—his in Iraq, mine in Iran. They were doctors, translators, journalists. We’d written letters on their behalf to American consulates, Fulbright committees, courts; we’d helped some of them find English lessons, housing, lawyers, friends. They came to this country fleeing war and repression. Some had suffered unimaginably. They believed—we believed—that they would find safety and freedom on these shores, and that the United States would be that much richer for extending them its welcome. We had no greater gift to give them, and no aspect of our country in which we believed more wholeheartedly.

The dinner was to celebrate our friends’ new lives. It was also to bring them together. We were witnesses, that night, to a searching conversation about the Iran-Iraq War, the shared blight on our guests’ childhoods that had given way, for our Iraqi friends, to more proximate traumas. But what I remember most about that night was the optimism around our table. There were green cards, medical licenses, and language skills still to be obtained. But for these humane and promising young people, a door had opened on a future that would make good on all they’d sacrificed, and the mood was energetic and lighthearted. America, at its shining best—and even at its blundering worst—was still such a place.

Today, Iraq and Iran top President Trump’s list of banned nationalities. Even legal permanent residents from these countries can no longer sleep easy, let alone travel freely. Families are cruelly sundered, not only by the Iranian authorities, whom they have every reason to fear, but now by American ones, too. No one, not even the mean and vulgar man who occupies the highest office of this land, can imagine that barring entry to grandmothers and babies, physicists and filmmakers, refugees and dual nationals, actually makes this country safer. That the optics of this are terrible, that its outcomes are as absurd as they are inhumane, can’t be accidental. The Trump Administration has announced itself beyond limits, beyond decency, beyond reason. That the America of our civics lessons still exists—in ­­airports and courtrooms and the roiling social-media feeds of an immigrant nation—is both comforting and somehow ominous. Protest, the average Iranian can tell you, is the recourse of an unrepresented people. Day by day, we look more like the countries our asylees have fled.

My husband and I have had the privilege of witnessing the immigrant experience at very close range. Throughout the late Bush era, refugees from Iran and Iraq streamed through our doors. When I balked at throwing a barbecue in my thirty-eighth week of pregnancy, my husband reassured me that at least we’d have four Iraqi doctors on site. More than one newly arrived Iranian couple lived in our home. We saw these Middle Eastern immigrants scramble to their feet and contribute their talents to this country, usually in impressively short order. We also saw the mountain they climbed in the doing. How does one find a job without a language, or rent an apartment without a job or a credit history, or transfer professional skills and credentials that have lost their context? I imagined myself in their shoes, remembering how dependent I felt on generous locals even as a visitor to Iran, and stood in awe of all they achieved and their determination to achieve it.

The Iranians I know were mainly dissidents under the Islamic Republic. Some are former political prisoners, or activists in a politicized civil society, who agitated for human rights and the rule of law despite the lack of any such protection. Inside Iran, I met countless people who dreamed of coming to the United States. American visas were perhaps the toughest in the world for them to obtain, but also the most sought after. You might wonder why. Life in the United States could be particularly complicated and difficult for Iranians. Sanctions and visa restrictions made it hard to move money or see family members. A kind of cold war between our two governments often buffeted immigrants’ private and professional lives. But I found that Iranians were attracted above all to our civic nation-state, in which belonging depended not on blood and soil but on commitment to shared values. These were people who came here to embrace rights and freedoms our new President holds in contempt.

This weekend, my social-media feeds are catalogues of outrage. The Iranian-American community is affected at every level. It is a well-organized community, and no stranger to protest. To this country’s everlasting shame, we can’t hope for our executive or our legislature to uphold the great goods that the nationals of these seven countries, and refugees from countless others, came here to seek. But two citadels remain, and they are two that Iranians, for one, have fought mightily to establish in their own country: an independent judiciary and a public free to speak its mind.