After President Donald Trump’s ultimatum for Iran was followed by a fragile two-week ceasefire, Iranian Americans in the United States said the pause did not end their anxiety—because the threat of escalation remained part of daily life. The agreement came after Trump did not carry out his warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” leaving many people describing a sudden shift from dread to uneasy relief and then to continued uncertainty.
For Zainab Haider, the whiplash began on Tuesday as she drove home from work in Austin, Texas, with two young children while thinking about whether relatives in Iran would be safe. She said the ultimatum created a range of emotions, including anxiety, fear and even loneliness, while many others appeared to be continuing normal routines despite the possibility of a broader catastrophe.
Haider said she protested Wednesday in Austin, calling for an end to the war, and described the mobilization as a way to change how U.S. leaders approach the conflict. She said, “It’s a huge country,” and added, “Trump is not going to ever be able to defeat it or wipe it out, but it is possible to do damage.” She said she believes it is possible to “do something that affects millions of people, millions of lives,” linking her organizing to fears about civilian impact.
Haider, a municipal planner and an organizer with the Austin for Palestine Coalition, said she does not support regime change and described it as something the Iranian people should determine rather than the United States. She also said she still remembers the neighborhood bakeries and juice shops she visited as a child with her mother and neighbors, underscoring the personal stakes she associates with the war’s direction.
Other Iranian Americans described concerns that extend beyond family safety and into worries about the risk to Americans serving in the military. Sheila Amir, a North Carolina writer, said Trump’s social media posts made her fearful “on multiple levels,” beginning with her inability to confirm whether Iranian relatives were safe during an internet blackout that she said had blanketed the country.
Amir said she also worries that escalation could put her U.S. relatives in the military at risk, adding that their duty is “to ‘serve and protect the United States of America,’ not to destroy the people of Iran.” She said the conflict discourse has left people struggling to reconcile support for U.S. actions that weaken the Iranian government with the danger posed by threats aimed at civilians.
Roya Rastegar described the emotional strain of trying to explain the conflict to children while dealing with grief and long-standing losses in her family. She and her wife are Iranian-American and, Rastegar said, people in her family have been killed by the Iranian government in the decades since the Islamic Republic took power, with most of her wife’s family still in the country.
As a filmmaker and cofounder of a pro-democracy nonprofit called the Iranian Diaspora Collective, Rastegar said frequent reversals have made conversations difficult, and she said, “It’s very hard to hold on to the idea that we do not know what’s going to happen.” She described what she called “an impossible moral dilemma,” saying she worries that intensified attacks on Iran could cause even more harm to civilians.
At the same time, Rastegar said she believes de-escalating the war without dismantling the Islamic Republic could pose the greatest risk to Iranians inside the country, who she said would continue to face severe and deadly repression. She said it was “really nauseating to just think about my people as being stuck between a regime that’s still killing them and an administration — the U.S. — that is issuing these kinds of threats.”
In cities across the country, Iranian Americans and other protesters took to the streets as debate over the war consumed attention and disrupted routine. Gatherings took place in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities, with some people calling for an end to the conflict and others guarding their views as they watched for what might follow the ceasefire.