In 2009, only a few months into his first year in office, President Barack Obama released a video message on the Persian New Year, Nowruz, giving his best wishes to those celebrating the holiday around the world. 

Karen Monahan, an environmental justice advocate with the Sierra Club, was one of thousands of Iranian Americans who watched online from her home in Minneapolis. It was an important turning point for her. “I was bawling,” she says. Born in Iran in 1974, she was adopted by American parents and grew up in Texas. Throughout her childhood, relations between the United States and Iran were so tense, she often told others that she was Latina. 

President Obama’s message was like an invitation to leave that shame behind, a signal that the U.S. government was ready to move past the previous administration’s labeling of the country as part of an “axis of evil.” 

Eight years later, Monahan is celebrating Nowruz again, this time under very different circumstances. On January 27, President Trump issued an executive order banning travelers from Iran and six other Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The ban was challenged in court, and the administration issued a second, more limited order on March 6, which has also been temporarily blocked. The administration’s actions have provoked widespread fear and uncertainty. 

Monahan and Mahyar Sorour, another Iranian American environmental justice advocate, had been planning a trip to Iran this summer. The two became friends through their work with the Sierra Club, and they dreamed of meeting and possibly collaborating with Iranian environmental activists. Both women have spent years working in low-income communities disproportionately impacted by air pollution, which is a severe problem in Iran. As of 2016, Iran had two out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, according to a Word Health Organization study. “We’ve learned so many skills,” Sorour says. “We could have a lot of conversations.” Monahan also had plans to look for her birth parents, but for now, they’ve put their trip on hold. 

Addressing big environmental problems like air pollution and climate change require the kind of international collaboration in which Monahan and Sorour were excited to take part. But Trump’s travel bans, among other ill effects, impede this kind of cross-cultural problem-solving, contributing to the general turmoil that the new administration’s policies have already inflicted on the global scientific community. According to a 2013 study from the National Science Foundation, more than 17 percent of scientists working in the United States were born abroad. Laboratories have stopped hiring researchers from the now-six countries affected by the travel ban (Iraq was removed from the most recent executive order) for fear that they can’t secure visas for them, and many scientists and academics are looking for work elsewhere. 

Nana Firman is the co-chair of the Global Muslim Climate Network, which is working on an initiative to get mosques across the Muslim world to switch to renewable energy. Needless to say, the travel bans have been a big headache. She has curtailed her travel schedule even though she is originally from Indonesia, which is not on the list, and is a permanent resident of the United States. “We don’t know if the list is going to change or not,” she says. “Even though now, they are holding back the travel ban, it’s still going to affect us.” Muslim climate activists within and outside her organization have contacted her seeking advice about whether to attend conferences and workshops in the United States, or to just stay put. “They have valid visas, but they say, ‘We are worried. Are we going to have problems if we come?’” 

Firman does see a silver lining in the current political climate. She has felt an outpouring of support from other environmental and interfaith groups, including some she hadn’t even known existed. “We are building bridges that we didn’t even imagine before,” she says. 

Monahan’s environmental justice advocacy began more than 10 years ago, when she was teaching low-income students and she began to think about all the problems that prevented them from reaching their full potential—whether it was lack of a good breakfast or lead exposure. This lens informs how she sees the travel bans. “Islamophobia is an environmental justice issue,” she says. Monahan points out how several of the banned countries are in the grip of environmental catastrophes—for example, Somalia is on the brink of famine because of ongoing drought, and Yemen is running out of water. The travel bans bar refugees from fleeing these environmental disasters, but it also makes it very difficult for communities living in the United States to extend a network of support to friends and family left behind. “That’s just wrong,” she says. 

For Nowruz this year, Monahan has been busy organizing, working with the National Iranian American Council to contact members of Congress and urge them to reject the travel bans. She’s also been attending Nowruz celebrations. She even held one with her Sierra Club colleagues. “To feel that support is just awesome,” she says.