She Got Kicked Out of Canada. Their Story Didn’t End There.

Dr. David Edward-Ooi Poon was living in Toronto and studying to be a public health physician in the spring of 2020 when he had a premonition that something awful was about to happen.

Canada had started clamping down on international visitors days after the World Health Organization declared a worldwide Covid pandemic on March 11, 2020. On April 10, Dr. Poon’s girlfriend, Alexandria Jasmin Aquino, of Bray, Ireland, had boarded a plane to Toronto for a visit both were sure had been cleared by authorities.

“That’s when the ‘Oh, no’ moment happened,” Dr. Poon said.

Ms. Aquino, who goes by AJ, had worked as a frontline nurse in Dublin at the time. She “had made it all the way here — we had our feet in the same country,” Dr. Poon said. But before they could celebrate or even set eyes on each other, a border guard confiscated her passport and rerouted her on the next flight back to Ireland.

“I was devastated,” Dr. Poon said. “I was isolated, the world was seemingly collapsing, and the person who gave me so much hope had been treated like a criminal and sent out of the country.”

A month later, the two formed Faces of Advocacy, a grass roots group that would eventually attract 11,000 members in its efforts to reunite couples and families separated by pandemic border restrictions.

Dr. Poon, 38, and Ms. Aquino, 28, met on Tinder in July 2017. Ms. Aquino had no dating app experience, but she was feeling adventurous while on vacation with her family in Toronto and signed up on a whim. “It was impulsive, like getting a new haircut,” she said. She swiped right on Dr. Poon because of his profile photo. In it, he was wearing autographed Spider-Man underpants, his arm around the Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee. “I thought, wow, this guy has to be one of a kind or some kind of maniac.”