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As the Trump administration prepares to implement a revised immigration ban that affects people from six Middle Eastern countries, a Longmont woman is sharing her family's immigration story in the hopes that it will add a personal dimension to the political conversation.

Maryam Moore's father, grandmother and aunt legally immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s from Tehran, Iran.

Her father studied aerospace, her aunt studied at the University of Colorado in Boulder and her grandmother started an ice cream shop in Denver.

Moore's father met her mother, an American citizen, and the rest, she said smiling, is history.

Moore said she never thought much about her Iranian heritage until President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 27 banning immigration from seven Middle Eastern countries for at least 90 days.

The original immigration ban listed Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and made no distinction between people trying to obtain a new visa and people who already hold valid visas or lawful permanent resident status.

The immigration executive order was halted by a federal judge and the federal appeals court upheld that ruling. The new immigration executive order, issued Monday and set to go into effect on March 16, removed Iraq from the list of countries and listed exemptions for people who have visas or green cards.

Critics of the revised ban told The Guardian that it's likely to alienate Iranian middle-class citizens who seek visas to the United States in order to study or visit relatives. That same group also tends to be critical of the Iranian government, The Guardian reported.

Moore said that after the original immigration order, she sat with her feelings for a few days.

"I couldn't stay silent anymore about the fact that my family immigrated to this country from one of the listed banned nations and that I owe all of my happiness and opportunity all that I hold dear to the ability that my family had to immigrate," Moore said.

Moore pulled together some of her family photos and wrote down her thoughts about her family's immigration story. Her daughter, Dani, used the iPad provided by the St. Vrain Valley School District to compile the photos and Moore's voice-over into a short video, which Moore posted on Facebook. The video has more than 1,100 views.

Moore said her hope is that the video promotes discussion about people from the six countries that doesn't just center on seeing them as the other.

"I wanted to show people that immigrants from these countries are valuable. We're families and we're people that feel so greatly blessed to have this opportunity," Moore said. "It's easy to group people or marginalize people and sometimes it's more convenient that way, but these issues are personal and they mean a lot."

Moore added that she understands that national security is a large part of the conversation around the immigration ban and she understands the importance of keeping the United States safe.

"I wholeheartedly agree that that's important. My message is specific that this is really personal for me. This is my family and my blood. We're not just an obscure people who want to do harm to anyone, let alone this great country," Moore said.

Moore said the conversation has been on her mind at work. She has taught fitness classes at the YMCA in Longmont for 10 years. Moore said that many of her most loyal fitness class attendees are Spanish-speaking immigrants.

"The most faithful group I have by far is the immigrant population. Many of my classes are taught with hand signals and nonverbal communication because we simply just have a language barrier," Moore said. "But it doesn't bother us much."

Moore said she wanted to create something around immigration that caused people to stop and listen to another perspective.

"This struck me in the heart because I knew that if this was in place in 1977, then my family wouldn't have come and I wouldn't exist and nothing that I love and value would have been possible," Moore said.

Karen Antonacci: 303-684-5226, antonaccik@times-call.com or twitter.com/ktonacci

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Longmont woman shares story of family's immigration from Iran - Longmont Times-Call