Spurned by U.S. and Facing Danger Back Home, Iranian Christians Fear the Worst

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Spurned by U.S. and Facing Danger Back Home, Iranian Christians Fear the Worst


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/us/iranian-christian-refugees.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=us&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&pgtype=article



Miriam Jordan


March 1, 2018


9-11 minutes
Iranian Christians and members of other religious minorities in Vienna last month. They are stranded in the city after being denied refugee status by the United States. Georg Pulling/Kathpress

LOS ANGELES — They sold their homes and possessions, quit their jobs, and left their country — they thought for good. The Iranians, mainly members of their nation’s Christian minorities, were bound for a new life in America after what should have been a brief sojourn in Austria for visa processing.

But more than a year later, some 100 of them remain stranded in Vienna, their savings drained, their lives in limbo and the promise of America dead.

Even as the Trump administration continued to pledge help to religious minorities in the Middle East, many of whom face persecution, the United States denied their applications for refugee status in recent weeks.

“It’s unexplainable,” said H. Avakian, 35, an ethnic Armenian Christian who arrived in Austria from Iran 15 months ago and asked that his first name be withheld out of fear for his safety. “Suddenly they said, ‘Now you can’t come.’ We don’t know why.”

Mr. Avakian, who hoped to join his brother, Andre, in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview that he and other refugees were running out of money and descending into depression. “Most of us cannot go back to Iran; we’re in complete despair,” he said.

Returning to Iran after an attempt to move to the United States would endanger their lives, he and other applicants said, because the government would regard them as enemies of the state.

“We are afraid they will give us a sentence,” Mr. Avakian said. “They could put us in jail.”

The Iranians applied to resettle in the United States under guidelines set by a 1989 law known as the Lautenberg Amendment, which offers safe haven to persecuted religious minorities. In the group are ethnic Armenian and Assyrian Christians, Mandeans, and Zoroastrians, most of whom have relatives in the United States who sponsored them...................