My daughter Sai completed her 14-day quarantine yesterday.
She arrived from the United States with more than a hundred other Thais on June 25 and was whisked right away to a hotel in Nonthaburi. It was a relief that she twice tested negative for Covid-19.
Now she will stay home for a while before returning to the US to enrol in a master's programme. We don't yet know how long she'll be home.
While we are happy to have her with us for the time being, the truth is we didn't really want her to come back so soon.
Some readers may already know that Sai is blind and travels with a guide dog. After graduating from Hendrix College in Arkansas in May last year, she spent a few months with us and in November returned to America to take a training course in independent living for the blind.
While there, she applied for a master's degree programme in mental health counselling and was admitted to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where, if things go as planned, she should start her course next month.
As her training for the blind was supposed to end this month, we thought it would be great if she could stay on and continue her graduate studies.
However, an immigration rule forbids a change of status from a training visa (M-1) to a student (F-1) one, so Sai had to return home to apply for an F-1 before going straight back to the US.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 wreaked havoc throughout the world. The aviation industry came to a sudden halt and several countries, Thailand included, had to close their air space.
Suddenly, returning home from America was like trying to climb a mountain without knowing how high it was.
It's taxing enough for a blind person to travel alone halfway across the world, what with all the documentation that is required. Travelling with a dog required another bunch of documents.
For a while, we were in a frenzy to find some way to spare her the arduous trip. We thought that an exception to the rule could and should have been made under these extraordinary circumstances. We now realise we were naïve to think that a vast bureaucracy like the American one could be rational or humane.
After we gave up hope, Sai contacted the Thai embassy in Washington, DC, to register for repatriation, only to find that 3,000 others had already registered before her. We thought we would have to wait forever and started planning ahead in case she needed to stay until after her training was completed.
Several days later, however, Sai was informed that a flight was available to bring her home but she had only a short time to get everything ready.
I had to assist her remotely because by then her training centre had been closed to in-person training.
She stayed alone in an apartment and there was no one to help with her paperwork. Thankfully, things worked out in the end. She arrived home without incident, entered quarantine and we took her dog home with us.
But just as her quarantine was coming to an end, President Donald Trump dropped another immigration bombshell.
This time, the US government was requiring that all international students enrol in at least one in-person class if they wanted to stay. If all their classes were online, they had to either leave the country or transfer to another institution which offered in-person classes ... or be deported. Those not already in the country could be denied entry visas.
This came at a time when most universities had already started migrating their classes online to protect their communities against infection.
The rationale behind this new rule appears to be politically motivated. The Trump administration is intent on forcing schools and universities to open in-person classes as a measure to reopen the American economy.
Whether it was intended or not, the brunt of the measure fell squarely on the more than one million foreign students attending American universities. The rule may also have been designed as an attack against China as Chinese students make up about one-third of all foreign students.
The new rule was introduced so suddenly it left everyone dumbstruck. Whatever the rationale, it caused great anxiety among foreign students.
Harvard University and MIT have filed a court complaint to try to stop the rule being implemented. Other universities are considering similar moves.
As for Sai, her own ordeal has not ended even now that she's back home. She needs to apply for her F-1 student visa but the American Embassy has suspended its non-immigrant visa service since mid-March due to the pandemic.
There's no word yet when it will resume, so my daughter and others in a similar situation face a seemingly endless wait -- and even when they get their visas, there's no guarantee they'll be able to book the flights they need.
We know Mr Trump has no qualms hitting out at friends or foes to achieve his goals but to hold innocent students hostage in his political game is both cruel and selfish.