Trump promised to protect Jews and religious liberty. His refugee ban is keeping out 700 persecuted Iranian Jews.
Iranian Jewish Americans are calling on Trump to make an exception for their friends and family
An Iranian cleric walks past a Jewish symbol of a menorah, shaped to spell the Hebrew words “shalom olam,” meaning “world peace,” during a ceremony commemorating the Jewish soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) at a Jewish cemetery in southern Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 6, 2025. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
(JTA) — When Haroun got the phone call he had been waiting on for almost 10 years, he told the caller to hang up. It was too risky for a Jew in Iran to take such a call — authorities could be monitoring his phone.
“Call me back on WhatsApp,” he said, putting faith in the messaging app’s promise of privacy and encryption.
It was early last year and a representative from the refugee agency HIAS, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, needed to tell Haroun that his turn had come.
As long as Haroun passed an FBI background check, he’d soon be able to settle in the United States under a special program for persecuted religious minorities. The sudden news came thanks to a decision by the Biden administration to relaunch the so-called Lautenberg Program for Iranians; it had shut down when Donald Trump enacted a travel ban on a group of Muslim-majority countries at the start of his first term in office in 2017.
Haroun was ecstatic. He had tried nearly everything in his quest to leave Iran and come to the United States, unsuccessfully applying for student and work visas.
“It was like seeing a miracle with your own eyes,” he said in a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, recalling the moment HIAS called. ”You simply can’t believe what it felt like. All I’ve wanted is to practice my religion freely.”
Haroun, who is in his early 30s, began making preparations in secret, telling almost no one about his plans. When applying for a passport, he lied, telling Iranian authorities he hoped to vacation abroad. They questioned him, but eventually approved his request, allowing him to leave as a tourist.
Haroun made it into the United States, to settle in Los Angeles, in late December, and it was just in time. Three weeks later, on the day Trump returned to the White House, the new president signed an executive order indefinitely suspending the admission of refugees. The order closed the country to 700 Iranian Jews who had applied for refugee status through HIAS, including Haroun’s parents, siblings, and cousins. These Jews were among more than 13,000 applicants from other religious minorities in Iran, including Christians, Baha’is, Sabean-Mandaeans, and Zoroastrians.
Independent information on the status of these groups is hard to come by, but they live under a host of legal restrictions that privilege Muslims. Haroun described a culture of fear gripping Iran’s Jewish community: “Our kids know they are not allowed to talk about their religion to other people,” he said.
Concern about the Jews of Iran spiked last year when authorities executed a young Jewish man who had been convicted of killing a man over money. Critics said the justice system had mishandled his case and that antisemitism played a role in his sentencing.
Iranian-American Jews who track Iranian media and stay in touch with relatives there say local Jews’ peril has grown, especially amid the war in Gaza that began when Hamas, which Iran backs, attacked Israel in October 2023. Israel and Iran have since traded direct fire for the first time, with Iran sending hundreds of missiles toward Israel and Israel bombing military facilities in Iran, as well as assassinating Hamas’ political chief in Tehran.
Elliot Benjamin, vice president of the Iranian American Jewish Federation, said Iranian officials have traditionally taken care, however disingenuously, to say they are opposed to Zionism but not to Jewish people. That distinction, he said, appears to be collapsing.
“In the past few months in comments by officials in the press, that line has not only been just blurry, it’s been completely crossed,” Benjamin, who is based in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “Now, it’s Jews are Zionist. Zionists are Jews. They are one and the same.”
Trump had said during his presidential campaign that he would end refugee resettlement on day one, so the executive order didn’t come as a surprise for HIAS.
“We knew this was coming, so we tried very hard to promote exceptions, particularly for Iranian religious minorities,” Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, said in an interview, recalling the period preceding Trump’s inauguration. “We tried it through every channel we could. We reached out to people who had good relationships with the Trump team.”
Based on the political views and pledges of Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, the possibility of an exception didn’t seem entirely outlandish. Their administration has said protecting Jews is a top priority and vowed to protect religious freedom around the world.
Trump last month, for example, formed a federal task force to combat antisemitism.
“Antisemitism in any environment is repugnant to this Nation’s ideals,” the head of the task force, Leo Terrell, said in a statement. “The [Justice] Department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found.”
Meanwhile, at the International Religious Freedom Summit last month, Vance spoke at length of Trump’s dedication to “the cause of advancing religious freedom in his foreign policy.”
“Both at home and abroad, we have much more to do to more fully secure religious liberty for all people of faith,” Vance said.
Iranian Americans have taken notice of how blocking the entry of persecuted religious minorities leaves some of the administration’s promises unfulfilled.
“Suspending or ending the Lautenberg Program is inconsistent with an administration that claims to be supportive of the Jewish community and supportive of Israel,” said Sam Yebri, a Los Angeles-based attorney and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council, who was born in Iran. “Being a friend to the Jewish community means more than standing up solely against Hamas or antisemitism at home. It means standing up for vulnerable Jews in Iran, in Venezuela, in Europe and throughout the world.”
The State Department referred a request for comment to the White House, which did not respond to an inquiry.
Besides Iranian minorities, other groups Trump’s executive orders keep out include Afghans who fought alongside American troops, Cubans and Ukrainian refugees, as well as asylum seekers at the southern border, reflecting a major break with the country’s historic embrace of refugee resettlement, born in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Trump has so far made one exception to his refugee ban. He signed an executive order last month that offered to take in as refugees white South Africans, citing alleged government-sponsored racial discrimination against them.
Haroun is a pseudonym; fearing retaliation against his family, he agreed to speak to JTA anonymously because he wants Americans to understand how precarious life is for the estimated 8,500 Jews who live in Iran.
“In Iran, we are not even free to do simple things like put the kippah on our heads outside of our homes,” he said. “We have to keep our religion a secret.”
Haroun is disappointed his family can’t join him in the United States but he remains hopeful that Trump will change his policy.
“I’m alone here in the United States and my family is in a bad situation,” he said. “I’m praying that maybe Donald Trump comes to understand the difference between Jews and minorities and everyone else in Iran. All Iranians are not the same.”
The Iranian American Jewish Federation also is also calling for an exception for Iranian religious minorities.
“While we understand the need for the current immigration policies, we would welcome an exception for the persecuted Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to be able to partake of the refugee program,” Benjamin said.
Originally serving to facilitate the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, the Lautenberg Amendment was enacted in 1990 and sponsored by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Jews took advantage of the program. Iranian religious minorities were added to the program in 2004 through an amendment sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, allowing an estimated 19,000 to resettle in the United States.
Historically, it was one of the surest paths to the United States. Applicants found an American sponsor, registered with HIAS, left their home and made it to a third country, usually Austria, where they awaited security vetting and additional processing before finally obtaining permission to immigrate.
“When they arrive in Vienna, they are basically assured of approval as long as they can establish that they are, in fact, members of those religious minorities,” Hetfield said. “The program works very well: our approval rate is over 99%. There’s very little opportunity for fraud. A Jew is a Jew in Iran. The Mandaeans are as much an ethnic group, which cannot intermarry. The Christians that we assist are Armenian or Assyrian Christians. So they’re ethnic Christians, not converts. The Baha’i — we verify the membership of every single Baha’i in advance, so we’re able to ensure the integrity of the program.”
The Lautenberg Amendment expires annually and Congress must act to reauthorize it, a reality that demands active lobbying by HIAS, especially in recent years. According to Hetfield, Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio and close Trump ally, has been skeptical about reauthorization.
“As chair of the Judiciary Committee, he merely has to object to it being included in the appropriation bill for it to be taken out,” Hetfield said. “That almost happened last year.”
The organization credited the insistence of Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas when the amendment overcame Jordan’s resistance. She retired last year amid health challenges that forced her to be mysteriously absent from Washington for months. Jordan’s spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
“We have to find another champion,” Hetfield said.
The fate of the amendment, which is typically tacked onto one of the annual spending bills, hangs in the balance as the March 15 deadline to approve this year’s budget looms.
The program ran relatively smoothly from its inception until near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term. So when Haroun applied in 2015, fresh out of high school, he expected to soon become an American, cherishing the dream of religious liberty. In late 2016, however, HIAS noticed that a group of Iranian refugees who had arrived in Austria were not getting processed. The refugee agency eventually learned that the FBI had changed its vetting process and neglected to inform the State Department, according to Hetfield.
Before a bureaucratic fix could come, Trump entered the White House in 2017 and signed a series of executive orders barring the entry of people from a number of predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran. The refugees were stuck in Austria, which led to a diplomatic crisis, because the country had intended only to serve as a transit point.
Austria was soon rocked by a major internal political crisis when a group of lawmakers were found to hold foreign citizenship, making them ineligible to serve in office. By the time the scandal settled down, it was early 2020 and the COVID pandemic forced a pause in global air travel. Only in 2023, after a six-year hiatus and tense international negotiations did the Lautenberg Program restart, albeit on a smaller scale, with a monthly quota of less than 150 people.
Several dozen Iranian Lautenberg refugees settled in the United States in the period leading up to Trump’s second inauguration and his shutting down of all refugee programs. This group includes Haroun and as well as an 89-year-old Iranian Jew, who settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, reuniting with his niece.
That decision, combined with Trump’s order to stop nearly all humanitarian assistance abroad, is forcing groups like HIAS to dramatically scale back life-saving operations, which for decades have relied on federal funding.
Active since the 1880s, HIAS is the country’s oldest refugee aid group. Some 1.4 million refugees and displaced people receive aid such as meals, mental health treatment, and legal services from HIAS every year. It annually resettles thousands of refugees, mostly to the United States.
The work has been enabled by an annual budget of $200 million, most of which has come from the federal government. HIAS is ramping up its philanthropic fundraising but doesn’t expect to make up for the disappearance of the government funding.
“Basically, it means a divorce from the U.S. government and their funding, because they’re not a trustworthy partner anymore,” Hetfield recently told Reuters.
Joining two Christian refugee resettlement agencies, HIAS filed suit against the Trump administration over the freeze, citing a mandate rooted in the American Jewish experience and the community’s historic support for immigration. Many other Jewish advocacy groups are similarly kicking into high gear.
“The American Jewish community owes its very existence to those times when the United States opened its doors to refugees fleeing anti-Semitism and persecution,” Hetfield said at the time. “The American Jewish community knows the heart of the refugees, for we were once refugees ourselves. Today, Trump has even slammed the door in the face of Christians, Jews and Baha’i fleeing Iran, as well as refugees from everywhere else.”
Recent survey data tends to support Hetfield’s outlook. An estimated 78% of American Jews believe that the country’s “openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation,” compared to 69% among all U.S. adults, according to Pew’s new Religious Landscape Study. American Jews are also significantly more likely to say the country’s “growing immigrant population” is “a change for the better” than the average among all Americans, at 50% versus 35%.
With American borders shut to them, the Jews of Iran can still find a haven by moving Israel, but many of the remaining ones are resistant to the idea, according to Benjamin.
“The current circumstances in Israel and the anti-Israel propaganda combined with the fact that many members of the community have relatives and friends in the United States, which they view as the land of opportunity, there is hesitation to make aliyah,” he said.
For the 10 years he tried to leave Iran, Haroun could have escaped the country and moved to Israel, but he didn’t. He believes that doing so would make seeing his family again — by meeting, for example, in a third country — too risky.
“If Iranian intelligence finds out that I’m in Israel, my family will be in danger,” he said. “They will kill my family.”
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