Trump Has Left Many Americans Stranded Amid His War on Iran
After Trump launched a war on Iran, US citizens were told to depart 14 countries immediately – with commercial flights grounded, and little help from the US.
For the past two years, I have been in a fight with the US government over a simple premise: that it’s the government’s job to protect its own citizens when their lives are in danger, wherever those citizens may be.
Right now, amid Donald Trump’s war in Iran, the US government has left many Americans in the lurch across the Middle East.
Since October 2023, I have represented dozens of Palestinian Americans and their families who found themselves trapped in Gaza, abandoned by the US government and forced to dodge bombs financed by their tax dollars. To bring these Americans home, we filed federal lawsuits across the country. Through litigation and media attention, we were able to bring home dozens of Americans and their immediate relatives. But the work is not yet done.
I still represent an American who, two years later, remains trapped in Gaza. Salsabeel Elhelou is a young mother whom Trump’s State Department refuses to evacuate because her three minor children are not citizens.
Today, as the US-Israeli war on Iran engulfs the Middle East, the US Department of State has issued an advisory telling Americans in 14 countries to depart immediately. What the State Department has failed to explain is just how Americans are supposed to leave with airspaces across the region closed, commercial airlines grounded, and local authorities instructing residents to shelter in place. Many of these countries do not currently have US ambassadors.
Turns out, Gaza was not an exception. It was a preview. The US government’s deadly indifference, which left Palestinian Americans to fend for themselves in Gaza, is now being replicated to all Americans across the Middle East.
Solutions That Solve Little
In the coming days, we will hear administration officials argue across cable television that evacuation planning is difficult. It is.
Trump, for his part, argued on Tuesday that the war “happened all very quickly” and claimed he thought “we were going to be attacked,” when he was asked why the US doesn’t have a plan to evacuate Americans overseas.
Later on Tuesday, the State Department said in a press release that it “is facilitating charter flights from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan for American citizens, and will continue to secure additional capacity as security conditions allow,” adding that commercial flights “remain available in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, and Egypt.”
The State Department’s press release describing this step as “historic action” is misleading. First, commercial aviation in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan never stopped. A limited number of flights have continued to depart daily, meaning Americans who were able to reach these hubs already had a way out. The Trump administration cannot credibly claim credit for adding charter flights in countries where airspace never closed.
Second, adding charter flights in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan – just 3 of the 14 countries affected by the State Department’s travel advisory – does not address the real bottleneck preventing Americans from leaving. Three days into the war Trump ignited, the State Department still appears to be operating on assumptions that do not hold in war time: safe highways, open airspace, and functioning border crossings.
Indeed, the department’s latest announcement focuses entirely on outbound capacity from relatively stable hubs, while saying nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Americans in more unstable and restricted parts of the region or how they are supposed to reach these chartered flights safely. While increasing charter capacity where commercial aviation is already functioning is a welcome step because it eases congestion, it does nothing for the Americans trapped in places where secure transit routes no longer exist.
War Planning Without Evacuation Planning Is Negligence
Our history shows that evacuation from besieged regions is difficult but far from impossible.
In 2006, when Israeli strikes destroyed Lebanon’s only functioning airport and Israeli forces sealed the country’s borders, Washington mobilized ships and aircrafts to evacuate roughly 15,000 Americans trapped inside the country. In 2011, chartered vessels and aircraft extracted Americans from Libya. In 2021, the US conducted one of the largest airlifts in modern history, evacuating more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan.
Within days of Oct. 7, 2023, the State Department organized cruise ships and chartered flights to bring Israeli-Americans home. In December 2023, I was contacted by a Palestinian American serving in the US Armed Forces whose mother was trapped in the besieged north of Gaza. In an elaborate, secret operation, the US government coordinated with Israeli and Egyptian officials to evacuate this service member’s mother and uncle.
So yes, evacuation is complex. It is expensive. And, it requires leverage, coordination, and political capital. But it is possible when political will exists.
That political will did not exist for the Palestinian Americans I represented.
And now, even Israeli Americans – who, under the Biden administration, benefited from State Department-coordinated departures – are being told they are on their own. Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s suggestion that Americans simply make their way to Egypt and attempt to catch a commercial flight that may or may not exist is not a strategy. It’s an abdication of the United States government’s legal and moral duty.
While the US does little, Italy has managed to get its citizens home, while France and the UK are chartering flights for their citizens, too.
I have seen firsthand what happens when a government treats the evacuation of its people as optional.
My client Mufid Harara of Dallas, Texas was killed when his shelter was bombed by the Israelis while he waited for his name to appear on an evacuation list. My client from the Bay Area, California, Basel El Farra, while waiting to evacuate Gaza, turned a plot of land he had proudly owned for decades into a mass grave where he buried pieces of his nieces, nephews, and neighbors.
My clients Borak and Hashem Alagha – American brothers from Chicago – were abducted by the Israeli Defense Forces before they could exit Gaza. They continue to languish in an Israeli prison without charge or due process.
These are not isolated tragedies. This is the foreseeable outcome of a government telling its citizens to fend for themselves while a war it started escalates around them.
Access Is the Real Passport
In our litigation filed on behalf of stranded Americans in Gaza, we argued that the State Department’s complete failure to organize meaningful evacuation infrastructure conflicted with its own regulatory obligations and with decades of historical precedent. The court ultimately ruled that evacuation decisions fall within executive discretion and are not subject to judicial intervention.
But executive discretion does not mean moral immunity. And it does not mean political unaccountability.
The lesson of Gaza was not that government-led evacuations are impossible. It was that they are selective. The real question is not whether the United States can extract its citizens from conflict zones. It is which citizens the United States chooses to extract.
Within days of war erupting, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz announced on X that he had departed Qatar on a private jet after coordinated intervention from congressional offices, White House officials, and Gulf contacts. That is what whole-of-government support looks like.
The average American expat – teachers, engineers, young American families – will not have Bruesewitz’ access to lawmakers and White House officials. They will not have Arab foreign ministers on speed dial.
What they do have is a passport and a belief that that is enough to protect them. But they are about to discover what my Palestinian American clients learned in 2023: Access is the real passport.
The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs operates with billions of dollars in funding to administer passports, overseas citizen services and crisis response operations. We the people fund this system. And funding it comes with an expectation — that when danger erupts, our government will act to protect us.
A nation that prepares meticulously for war must prepare just as meticulously to bring its people home from that war. Anything less diminishes the meaning of citizenship itself.
Maria Kari is a Houston-based human rights attorney, freelance journalist, and founder of Project Taha, a legal nonprofit focused on defending politically vulnerable communities and holding powerful institutions accountable. Follow Maria on X.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
Check out more from Zeteo:
Oh this is f’n beautiful. The sequence is pristine:
Fire State Department staff for ideological purity → launch war → embassies get attacked → order evacuation of 14 countries → airports closed → skeleton crews can’t process evacuations → post “hastily drafted announcement” on X
State officially called this “an apparently unplanned-for crisis.”
Translation: “We gutted our own capacity, started a war anyway, and are shocked we can’t handle basic consular functions.”
It’s like firing all the firefighters, setting a building on fire, then tweeting “please evacuate” while wondering why nobody’s putting it out.
The operational brilliance:
Planes turning around mid-flight because airspace keeps closing
Six embassies operating under skeleton crews during active attacks
Crisis response strategy: post on X
3,000 Americans requesting help (real number across 14 countries? Tens of thousands—but State has no f’n clue)
This is mercenary foreign policy at scale. You don’t need a functioning State Department when your objective is bombing whoever paid your son-in-law $3.5 billion.
Diplomacy? Consular services? Those require boring institutional competence. Trump optimized for spectacle and extraction. Americans stranded in war zones? Externalities.
The autophagy is complete: the system is eating itself in real-time and live-tweeting the self-cannibalization.
Turns out you actually need that tedious institutional capacity when things go sideways.
Who knew?
….And the people paying the price? Americans stranded in war zones because their government optimized for grift over competence.
Do we need anymore information to realize that world wide, led by Trump, what we are in
is a war on race. Brown/black/Asian face and name? You can't come "home". Your color defines what American citizenship is. Ironic since so many people, in Trumps white house lineage have changed their names to work, live and travel. It's the long neglected end of a civil war fought in 1865 and never fully won,