This year, as migrant families from Latin America were separated at the US southern border, dozens of Iranian families have reunited on the northern one at a unique library.
Drawn by word-of-mouth and a smattering of social media posts, they have come to the geopolitical gray zone at the rural frontier library, located at once in Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec.
Recounting her journey from New York City to a tiny town in northern Vermont, Iranian student Shirin Estahbanati said she cried at the thought of seeing her father for the first time in nearly three years. Since then, he had suffered a heart attack, and she hadn’t dared leave America to comfort him.
Estahbanati, like many Iranian students in the United States, has a single-entry visa and can’t leave the country without risking that she won’t be allowed back in. And her parents, as Iranian citizens, are blocked by US President Donald Trump’s travel ban from visiting her…