“Some friends do a fund-raising site for me, and I believe without this I would never make it,” said Ms. Isweiri, 41,<br />who made it back to Colorado on Sunday, two days after a federal judge put a halt, for now, on the travel ban.<br />“Where is the disclosure on what you are doing with $12,000?”<br />Mr. Martinez said that people were underestimating the costs — not just for all the international cellphone calls, printing bills for legal filings and the $3,200 for same-day flights from Tehran to Frankfurt to Boston,<br />but also for an immigration lawyer to work on her case in what was expected to be a protracted legal battle.<br />But the largest crowdfunding site, GoFundMe, and a company it recently acquired, CrowdRise, have seen more than 50 new campaigns<br />that have raised nearly $1.5 million related to the executive order, which halted travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely.<br />Trapped in an airport terminal in Jordan by President Trump’s travel ban, Hanan Isweiri fretted<br />that as a Libyan citizen she would not be able to return to her husband and three children in Colorado.<br />D. graduate of Clemson University, was trapped in her native Iran, they set up a GoFundMe page with a $30,000 goal to help get her back,<br />and were met with criticism over what some users of the site perceived as a very high figure.<br />“No matter how great the NGOs and government agencies are, a lot of people will fall through the cracks.”<br />GoFundMe takes 5 percent of the funds raised for administrative fees and an additional 2.9 percent for credit card processing.<br />Just about the only thing she did not have to worry about — despite staying in airport hotels in Jordan<br />and Turkey, and repeatedly booking and rebooking intercontinental flights in those chaotic early days — was money.
