President Donald Trump’s temporary travel bans on people from several Muslim-majority countries may not survive legal challenges, but their effects may be permanent for University of South Florida student Mehdi Zeyghami. He is stuck in Iran, and his efforts to continue his solar power research in Tampa appear to be getting little help from USF’s administration.
Zeyghami is a PhD candidate in the mechanical engineering department at USF. His academic adviser is the well-known solar power and renewable energy expert Yogi Goswami. Zeyghami is a research assistant at the Clean Energy Research Center and has spent more than four years progressing toward his degree developing solar-assisted cooling systems.
“I have worked on projects that we had at our lab and we have published papers on it,” he told me via Skype in February.
“It’s a two-part project. I’m working on designing some kind of… heat exchanger that can emit the heat by radiation from the surface of the earth to the outer sky or cool down without using any water or electricity. It’s not a new concept, but we are doing it in a new way that can be used to cool buildings or any structure on earth without using energy or water.”
Cool. That sounds like valuable research for a planet that’s getting warmer, in part because of the burning of fossil fuels to create electricity for A/C.
Zeyghami says one way his research could be applied is in solar power plants, especially those located in deserts. “In an arid location there is no water; you don’t have any source of cooling. They usually use air-cooled condensers or coolers at the solar power plants. If you can find a way that uses no energy and no water for cooling, that will improve the performance of the solar power plant,” Zeyghami said. Another use is when there’s a need for cooling food or medicine in remote locations far from a source of electricity.
But now that research, and Zeyghami’s degree, are in jeopardy.
The chain reaction started in late January.
Zeyghami traveled to his home country of Iran in May 2016 to take care of his sick mother. But getting back to the U.S. wasn’t easy. “Since that time,” he told me in February, “I’m stuck here… because of the problems with the visa that is coming up for Iranians. I had my visa interview more than eight months before and it went through a strict vetting and screening, and after eight months, my visa [was] approved.”
He received an email saying he had finally been granted the visa on Thursday Jan. 26. But the next day Trump’s executive order banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran.
“On Monday,” says Zeygami, “I received the email that [said], ‘Your visa is refused’ or my application is refused and I cannot use my visa.”
Courts quickly struck down Trump’s first executive order, but by then the damage had been done for Zeyghami because his once-approved visa would not materialize.
But he kept trying.
The State Department website says of foreign students, “You must have a student visa to study in the United States.” The F-1 student visa applies to many education levels, including universities.
Because there’s no U.S. embassy in Iran, Zeyghami had traveled to neighboring Armenia to get interviewed for the visa to return to the U.S. He even optimistically went back there after Trump’s first travel ban was rejected by courts.
“I hoped that the court ruling would make it possible for me to pick up my approved visa. I went to the embassy in person and made it inside. But they informed me that the refused visas will stay refused and I need to apply again. I stayed there for a few days hoping to get an expedited interview appointment. But I was not successful,” he emailed this month.
So Zeyghami has resorted to even more uprooting in order to make it back to Florida. He picked up and left Iran for a neighboring country to try to minimize the travel it would take to visit U.S. embassies seeking the visa.
To avoid unwanted attention he doesn’t want to name where he’s living, nor the location of the U.S. embassy where he had a visa interview appointment. It happened this month, Zeyghami says, “and I’m waiting for the administrative processing to go through. It is not known how long it will take, but for a short period of time I am staying with my relatives” in a country neighboring Iran.
This month President Trump signed a second executive order restricting entry from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran is still on the “bad” list; Iraq was dropped this time). People with visas are supposed to be in the clear under the “Muslim Ban 2.0,” but until Zeyghami has the promised document in hand, he won’t have a shot at finishing his degree in Tampa.
Several states, like Hawaii, Washington, Maryland, Oregon and Minnesota, are challenging the new executive order on grounds similar to reasons the first was rejected by the courts. They say the ban hurts the states’ competitiveness in recruiting the best academics or scientists, or that it violates the U.S. Constitution. A judge in Wisconsin has already blocked the new ban from being applied against one Syrian family.
Zeyghami’s labor union, USF Graduate Assistants United, is speaking up as well. Zeyghami’s plight was brought up at a town hall meeting in Tampa in February. Ostensibly, the town hall was held so that Florida’s Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio could hear from his constituents. Rubio did not attend; his office said he was in Europe (he was spotted in Miami the following morning, but now we’re straying off topic). Suzanne Young, a GAU member, pleaded with Senator Rubio (in absentia) to help Zeyghami and oppose Trump’s executive orders.
“You have the power to expedite his visa process. You have the power to bring him back to USF to continue his studies. So, will you help him?” the biology graduate student asked, to applause from the nearly 500 people in attendance.
The GAU has also reached out to to the member of the U.S. House who represents USF, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Tampa). Castor told me she can’t comment on any individual case, but confirmed that grad student union members had spoken with her about Zeyghami.
“The Trump executive order number one threw so many lives into chaos. Unfortunately it included this student at the University of South Florida and many others,” Castor said. “We’re going to have to work through it under Trump order number two. It still appears that it’s an irrational ban.”
USF administration has supported Zeyghami as strongly as its students, starting with an abrupt cut-off of his access to his USF email. From his gmail account in early February he wrote me, “I am in Iran and [USF] decided to block my accounts in accordance to the embargo.”
This came days after the Tampa Bay Times first reported Zeyghami’s story. But is it really a violation of law for USF to allow a student who happens to be in Iran access to its email servers?
The USF administration turned down my requests for an interview — they’ve said “due to student privacy laws” they’re prohibited from discussing “additional details about an individual student’s situation.” In an email, USF spokesperson Adam Freeman cited a federal regulation related to U.S. sanctions on Iran as to why the university cut off Zeyghami’s access to the USF email server.
Zeyghami's supporters have asked U.S. Rep. Castor whether he should still have access to his USF email. “A student raised that to me last Friday [March 3] and I promised them I’d look into that,” Castor told me.
The biology graduate student and union leader, Suzanne Young, says she appreciates the conversations that officials in the University of South Florida’s administration have had with Zeyghami’s supporters and that there are legal complications related to student privacy and Iran. “But USF has not prioritized the needs of their student in this time of crisis. USF has demonstrated that they will not stand up for students under attack. In fact they have actively impeded progress and communication.” Young calls USF’s response “frustrating and disappointing, and while we know there are many individuals who care, this default of protecting the institution before protecting the students it serves is unnerving and speaks to a larger systemic problem and culture at our University.”
All of this begs the question of why travelers from Iran are forbidden by the Trump administration from entering the U.S. When we spoke by Skype in February, Zeyghami told me, “There is no reason to ban Iranians from entering the country. There is no connection between any, any terror attack on U.S. soils and any Iranian immigrant or refugee or anything. You can Google it. If you can find one case that an Iranian was involved in any terror attacks, I can say: ‘OK, this is right. You don’t need to protest, Iranians are bad people.’ But, Iranians are not bad people.”
Maybe Trump’s travel ban will get struck down by the courts (again). Maybe the U.S. Embassy will grant Zeyghami a visa. But in the meantime he just wants to return to Tampa, finish his Ph.Dand contribute to the field of renewable energy.
Seán Kinane is assistant director of news and public affairs at 88.5 FM WMNF Community Conscious Radio in Tampa. This article is based on his reporting for WMNF, which is archived at http://wmnf.org/news.
This article appears in Mar 16-23, 2017.
