The Libyan student who sued Trump -- and won
By Christian Caryl March 16 at 11:45 AM
When Zakaria Hagig decided to leave his war-torn homeland for college in Colorado, he never dreamed that he’d one day be suing the president of the United States. But when President Trump issued his Jan. 27 executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States, Hagig realized that he had to act. “I never thought that such a thing would happen,” he told me. “For a long time all I knew about the U.S. was that they have freedom of religion, freedom of belief. Was this really the U.S. that they’d told me about?”
The revised version of Trump’s executive order was supposed to take effect Thursday — stripped of some of its worst excesses, but still sufficiently problematic for it to be blocked yet again by the federal courts. The credit for that goes to the many Americans who pushed back against the original ban, from the demonstrators who flooded into airports in support of those affected to the federal judges who issued formal challenges to Trump’s order. But the 24-year-old Hagig has also played his part — a particularly remarkable one, considering that he hails from Libya, one of the countries targeted by the ban.
For a few years after the fall of dictator Moammar Gaddafi, Hagig kept plugging away with his studies in computer science at a local university. But by 2014, as the civil war that followed Gaddafi’s removal was entering its third year, Hagig began to lose heart. His father, an engineer, had studied overseas abroad earlier, and the family decided that it was time for Hagig to try his luck elsewhere. Having enrolled in an English-language-study program in Denver, he applied for a U.S. student visa at an American consulate in Europe during a visit there. (The United States hasn’t issued visas in Libya for several years now because of the ongoing war.)
So that was how, equipped with a student visa, Hagig arrived in Colorado in summer 2014. After finishing his English course, he enrolled in the business program at the Community College of Denver. His plan was to complete his degree there, then move on to further study at a four-year college.
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