President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 28 barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

This ban affects families escaping danger, parents wanting a better life for their children, teachers with green cards, Google employees, Oscar nominees, college students with valid student Visas – the list goes on.

This hit home for me when I saw that two class of 2021 students admitted into Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted on Facebook that they may not be able to attend next year because they don’t fit President Trump’s xenophobic image of America. And just to clarify, these are two people who are part of the 7% of all applicants who were accepted early into the best engineering school in the nation. There’s absolutely no questioning whether or not they would be an asset to American society. They have the potential to do more good for society than many of the people supporting the Muslim ban.

This isn’t a matter of political party, religious belief, socioeconomic status – it’s a matter of human life. America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but I’m having a hard time finding anything free or brave about this ban. You can’t “make America great again” by barring an entire group of people from the country on the basis of differences; Doing so takes away what fundamentally makes America great (our differences).

Immigrants known as the founding fathers wrote in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those unalienable rights are alienated once people are denied a chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is what the ban is doing. It’s only right that this nation upholds the values upon which it was created. Call your representatives, write to your senators. This issue isn’t about politics, it’s about humanity.