NAIROBI, Kenya — As the results of the American presidential election rolled in on Nov. 4, a young Sudanese couple sat up through the night in their small town south of Khartoum, eyes glued to the television as state tallies were declared, watching anxiously. They had a lot riding on the outcome.

A year earlier, Monzir Hashim had won the State Department’s annual lottery to obtain a green card for the United States only to learn that President Trump, in his latest iteration of the “Muslim ban,” had barred Sudanese citizens from immigrating to the United States.

The election seemed to offer a second chance, and when Mr. Trump was eventually declared to have lost the vote, Mr. Hashim and his wife, Alaa Jamal, hugged with joy and erupted in wedding-style ululations.

But the couple were on a knife’s edge for the next 11 weeks as fraud allegations, legal challenges and the mob attack on the Capitol seemed to cloud the results. Ms. Alaa, compulsively checking Facebook, had to stop herself. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she said.

She dared to look on Wednesday when Joseph R. Biden Jr., hours after being sworn in as president, rescinded the entire raft of Trump-era orders that had blocked people across the world, mostly Muslims like herself, from entering the United States. She wept with joy.

“Finally, happiness,” she said over the phone. “Now we start planning again.”

Few foreigners welcomed Mr. Biden’s election victory as enthusiastically as the tens of thousands of Muslims who have been locked out of the United States for the past four years as a result of the Trump-era immigration restrictions popularly known as the “Muslim ban.”

By one count, 42,000 people were prevented from entering the United States from 2017 to 2019, mostly from Muslim-majority nations like Iran, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. Immigrant visas issued to citizens of those countries fell by up to 79 percent over the same period.

But the human cost of Mr. Trump’s measures, stitched into the fabric of disrupted lives stained with tears and even blood, can hardly be counted — families separated for years; weddings and funerals missed; careers and study plans upended; lifesaving operations that did not take place.

Then there is the damage to America’s reputation from a policy viewed by some countries as comparable to the worst stains of modern United States history, like the C.I.A.’s torture chambers, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Mr. Biden said in his order revoking the restrictions that Mr. Trump’s measures — a lattice of one executive order and three presidential proclamations whose stated aim was to keep terrorists out — undermined American security, jeopardized its global alliances and presented “a moral blight that has dulled the power of our example the world over.”

For some, the reversal simply came too late.

Negar Rahmani had planned to sit out the Trump presidency. After the first immigration directive in January 2017 targeted her country, Iran, Ms. Rahmani, a graduate student of neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island, set aside plans to return home. She urged her parents to make do with video calls until a new American president had been elected.

But then the pandemic struck and in November Ms. Rahmani’s 56-year-old mother in Iran was hospitalized with Covid-19, leaving her daughter with an agonizing dilemma. If Ms. Rahmani, 26, flew home she risked being shut out of the United States for good. But her mother’s condition was deteriorating rapidly.

Torn, she wavered for two weeks until the disease intervened, and her mother died.

Now Ms. Rahmani is wracked by different feelings, she said in an interview: regret at not going home while her mother was alive, and a deep contempt for Mr. Trump and the immense pain his policy had caused her.

“I feel like I have been in a cage for four years,” she said, breaking into sobs. “I could have gone back every summer. My mom could have visited me. I feel the travel ban in my bones and skin.”

Other stories of broken hearts and dashed dreams are scattered across the Middle East and Africa, mostly in its most vulnerable and war-torn corners.

A Syrian dentist, Dr. Abdulaziz al-Lahham, was refused permission to visit his American wife in New York after an otherwise friendly American consular officer saw his passport. “His face totally dropped, simply because I’m Syrian,” said Dr. al-Lahham, 31.

A Somali refugee, Muhyadin Hassan Noor, was stranded with his wife and six children at a dust-blown camp in northeastern Kenya despite having approval to resettle in Minnesota since 2017. “We were treated in a way that wasn’t right,” said Mr. Noor, 53.

Then there is Shawki Ahmed, a Yemeni-born New York City police officer who struggled for three years to get his wife and children out of Yemen, a country in a hellish civil war, to the family home in Jamaica, Queens. “You’re a police officer. You’re out there risking your life, yet you don’t know what’s going on with your kid,” said Mr. Ahmed, 40.

The family eventually got permission to come to America in October but the sting of injustice lingered. “Trump betrayed so many law-abiding citizens based on their religion and their last name,” Mr. Ahmed said.

By the end, after over 100 court challenges and several iterations, Mr. Trump’s “Muslim ban” had become an African one, too. It barred entry to most citizens from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen; halted immigration from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria; restricted selected people in Tanzania; and included Venezuela, too.

The ban was upheld in the Supreme Court, which said that despite the president’s incendiary words about Muslims, the ban was justified as an antiterrorism policy. But the ruling came with a searing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who likened it to the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision that upheld the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Since the doors were flung open this past week, many prospective visitors have been picking up the pieces to try again. A travel agent in Libya said there had been a sudden interest in American visa applications. In Nigeria the Biden election will likely “flood the visa offices,” said Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, a political-science professor at Babcock University in Ogun state.

Despite the worldwide backlash over the ban, America still holds an immense global appeal, especially to citizens of fragile nations. “It’s oof, relief, an optimistic feeling,” said Nizar Asruh, a Libyan in San Diego who said he hoped his mother could now get a visa to come visit.

As well as expediting outstanding applications, Mr. Biden has ordered an immediate review of all visas rejected under Mr. Trump’s measures, and an assessment of contentious “extreme vetting” security procedures that include screening an applicant’s social media feeds.

But immigration advocates warn that a return to the pre-Trump system will not be a panacea.

“Even before, the system was discriminatory and not welcoming to Muslims,” said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It was under the Obama administration that you had the expansion of a terrorism watch list to over a million names that, as far as we can tell, is essentially a list of Muslims.”

Capitol Riot Fallout

From Riot to Impeachment

The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:

• • As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.
  • A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.
  • Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.
  • Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.
  • The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.

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