Iranian Americans living in the United States are coping with fear and uncertainty after President Donald Trump made threats toward Iran and later accepted a fragile two-week ceasefire in the war, Associated Press reported. For many, the uncertainty is not limited to events abroad; it shows up in daily routines, family conversations, and protest plans as they try to gauge what comes next.
Zainab Haider, a municipal planner, described how she spent Tuesday driving home with her two young children while thinking about the timeline Trump set for Iran to give in to U.S. demands. She said the range of emotions that followed included anxiety and fear, even as others appeared to continue their lives normally in the face of what she saw as an imminent catastrophe, according to the AP report.
Haider said the president did not carry out the threat to “toda una civilización morirá esta noche” and instead accepted a two-week ceasefire. In response, she joined Wednesday’s protests in Austin, Texas, calling for an end to the war, AP reported. She said mobilizing would generate “el tipo de presión que hace más difícil que Trump vuelva a esa postura agresiva”.
Haider also said she does not support a change of regime, arguing that such a decision should be resolved by the Iranian people rather than the United States. Even so, she said she felt compelled to speak out, and she described keeping memories of neighborhood bakeries and juice shops she visited with her mother and neighbors after moving to the United States from Pakistan as a child.
Sheila Amir, an Iranian American writer based in North Carolina, said Trump’s social media posts gave her fear on multiple fronts, according to AP. Her first concern was relatives in Iran, and she said she could not confirm whether they are OK during a week that has included an internet outage affecting the country. Amir also said escalation could put at risk relatives in the United States who are in the military, and she said her duty is “servir y proteger a los Estados Unidos de América”, not to destroy the Iranian people.
Other Iranian Americans described a more complicated posture, including people who support attacks aimed at weakening Iran’s government but still struggle to absorb threats against civilians. Roya Rastegar, a filmmaker and co-founder of Iranian Diaspora Collective, said she has had difficult conversations with her family about the conflict in recent weeks, AP reported.
Rastegar said people in her family were killed by the Iranian government in decades since the Islamic Republic came to power, and she said most of her wife’s family remains in the country. She said the conflict’s frequent turns have made it harder to explain the situation to her children, describing it as “muy difícil aferrarse a la idea de que no sabemos qué va a pasar”.
Rastegar said the war presents what she called an impossible moral dilemma. She said she worries that intensifying attacks against Iran could cause additional harm to civilians, but she also said that de-escalating without dismantling the Islamic Republic could create the greatest risk for Iranian people inside the country, who she said would continue to face severe and deadly repression.
She said she feels “nausea” at the prospect of her people being trapped between a regime that still kills them and a U.S. government issuing threats, AP reported.