If Trump is serious about antisemitism, he should reopen this lifeline for refugees

Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to reauthorize the Lautenberg Amendment , a refugee program that has, for decades, helped Jews escape antisemitism in Iran. But the Trump administration has effectively shut the program down, by closing the processing centers that allow it to work. An odd choice for an administration that rarely misses a chance to tell us how seriously it takes antisemitism .

The Lautenberg-Specter program was enacted in 1990 to help persecuted Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union reunite with family in the United States, then expanded in 2004 to include religious minorities in Iran. Congress has reauthorized it on a bipartisan basis ever since. The danger it was meant to answer has not gone away and, indeed, may have only become more inflamed. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has called Iran “the worst source of antisemitism in the world.” The bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says Iran is sponsoring “a global campaign of antisemitism,” targeting Jews and Jewish sites. And yet the Trump administration has closed one of the few paths built specifically to help them, and others persecuted because of their faith, escape.

The Lautenberg-Specter program has hardly been an open door. For Iranian religious minorities, the way out began with someone already in the United States, a family member or friend willing to sponsor them and help support them once they arrived. Jews, Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, and Sabean Mandaeans began their applications in Iran and, because the United States has no embassy there to interview them, those who reached the next stage left Iran for Austria.

There, the Resettlement Support Center in Vienna received their applications, prepared the documents, arranged interviews with U.S. government officials and mandatory medical examinations, and helped with the paperwork for their eventual placement in the United States, while American law enforcement carried out background and security checks.

More than 33,000 members of Iran’s religious minorities made it through that system between 2001 and 2025. When the State Department ended the grant that paid for the center, which the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had run in partnership with the government for over 25 years, more than 14,000 Iranians were still in the pipeline. The society no longer knows what has happened to many of them. The organization lost access to the government data it used to follow individual cases when the processing center closed. Its public guidance now directs applicants seeking information about their cases to the State Department or their representatives in Congress.

The people waiting in the Lautenberg pipeline have had more reason to leave in the past year than ever before. Since the war with Israel began, Iranian authorities arrested more than 20,000 people , including members of the country’s Baha’i, Christian and Jewish minorities. Baha’is were arrested, interrogated and had their homes raided and property confiscated; even before the war, authorities in Urmia had sealed four Baha’i-owned businesses after their owners closed them to observe a religious holiday.

At least 35 Jews in Tehran and Shiraz were summoned and interrogated about relatives in Israel, and members of the Jewish community were arrested in three provinces, some facing accusations of espionage. At least 54 Christians were reportedly arrested in the month after the war. The campaign has reached beyond Iran as well. In January 2025, an officer in Iran’s Quds Force recruited a Georgian drug trafficker and offered him $200,000 to assassinate Rabbi Shneor Segal in Azerbaijan, a plot Azerbaijani authorities broke up before it could be carried out. Trump’s restrictions on travel from Iran even include an explicit exception for immigrant visas for “ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution in Iran.”

Trump has made antisemitism one of the causes of his second presidency. He has created a federal task force to combat it, ordered agencies to use the government’s legal powers against it, and promised to confront it “at home and abroad.” His administration has investigated universities , threatened billions of dollars in federal funding , and pursued foreign students over what it says is “violent anti-Semitic incidents on campus.”

Yet in Iran, where Jews have been interrogated about relatives in Israel, arrested on suspicion of espionage, and surveilled in their own synagogues, one of the oldest American programs for getting them out has been dismantled.

By the end of this month, Congress should reauthorize Lautenberg. The administration should refund and reopen the processing centers that support it. Fourteen thousand stranded people, and their families in America, are waiting to see whether Trump’s promises about fighting antisemitism abroad mean anything when Jews facing persecution actually need a way out.

Mia Emmunah Toubian is an Iranian American journalist and human-rights researcher whose work at Harvard Medical School investigated the treatment of women political prisoners in Iran. Jason Bryan Silverstein is a writer and anthropologist focused on health and human rights, and he directs the Media, Medicine, and Health Program at Harvard Medical School.