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

The Lautenberg-Specter program, created in 1990 to help persecuted Jews and Christians from the former Soviet Union and expanded in 2004 to include Irans religious minorities, depends on overseas processing centers to move applicants from initial filing to resettlement in the United States. For Iranians, applicants typically begin their claims in Iran and travel to Vienna for interviews, medical screenings, and coordination of U.S. security and law-enforcement checks because the United States lacks an embassy in Iran. Those services had been provided for more than 25 years by a Resettlement Support Center in Vienna run in partnership with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

According to the report, the State Department ended the grant that funded that center, effectively closing a primary channel for Lautenberg applicants. At the time of the grants termination, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society estimated that more than 14,000 Iranians remained in the programs pipeline; the organization no longer has access to the government data it used to track individual cases and now directs inquiries to the State Department or congressional offices.

Advocates and the authors of the piece say the timing has intensified urgency: since the war with Israel began, Iranian authorities reportedly arrested more than 20,000 people and detained members of Bahai, Christian, Jewish and other minority communities. The article cites specific incidents including interrogations of at least 35 Jews in Tehran and Shiraz, arrests of at least 54 Christians in the month after the war began, and reported harassment of Bahais through raids, interrogations and property seizures. The piece also notes an alleged assassination plot foiled in January 2025 that targeted a rabbi outside Iran.

The authors contrast those developments with actions by the Trump administration, which has publicly prioritized combating antisemitism through a federal task force and other measures, but which they argue has undermined a concrete resettlement pathway by closing the Vienna processing center. They urge Congress to reauthorize the Lautenberg program by the Sept. 30 deadline and call on the administration to restore funding and reopen the processing infrastructure that facilitated resettlement for tens of thousands of Iranian religious-minority refugees.

Authors: Mia Emmunah Toubian, an Iranian American journalist and human-rights researcher affiliated with Harvard Medical School, and Jason Bryan Silverstein, a writer and anthropologist who directs the Media, Medicine, and Health Program at Harvard Medical School.