WASHINGTON – American journalist Reza Valizadeh visited his elderly Iranian parents in March 2024 for the first time in 15 years. Valizadeh’s stories for Voice of America and other U.S. government-funded outlets often criticized the Iranian regime. So before traveling, he sought and received confirmation that he would be safe from a high-ranking commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of Iran’s armed forces. However, in September that same year, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested Valizadeh, and Tehran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to ten years in prison for “collaboration with a hostile government.”
In the Rotunda of the Senate Russell Building last week, the Bring Our Families Home campaign set up portraits of Valizadeh and 12 other Americans currently wrongfully detained overseas. The group, family members of illegitimately detained Americans, appealed to Congress to push for their safe return. Each foam poster board included the name, home state, and country of detainment. The display also included portraits of the 33 people released after advocacy by the James W. Foley Foundation.
The portrait of Reza Valizadeh stands in the Senate Russell Rotunda in front of images of wrongful American detainees that the Foley Foundation has helped bring home. (Jacques Abou-Rizk, MNS)
The morning of Wednesday, May 6, the families of the campaign stood together in the Senate Russell Rotunda holding the portraits of their loved ones.
One of the people holding portraits was Neda Sharghi, a former chair of the campaign, whose brother returned to the U.S. in 2023 after being wrongfully detained in Iran for 5 years, convicted of espionage without a trial.
Sharghi said the challenges of individual advocacy reinforce the value of a campaign made up of families.
“Individual families generally have a hard time getting the attention of the media, senior-level officials, and the administration,” Sharghi said. “We decided that we were going to bring our voices together and advocate as a whole organization.”
While people walked through the portraits set up on easels, Congress was out of session, so no lawmakers were spotted.
“For a lot of these families, it’s the last photo they have of their loved one,” said the artist for the campaign, Isaac Campbell. “Art offers so much opportunity for storytelling and interpretation and reflection that I think it’s really the best way to meet people and remind them that these people are not political issues, they’re human beings.”
Valizadeh is among 42 Americans determined to be wrongfully detained overseas by the Foley Foundation. Because the U.S. does not publicly disclose a list of wrongful detentions abroad, the nonprofit advocacy group researches cases and maintains a list. The Foley Foundations names 16 of the 42 whose families requested public advocacy. These people hail from Florida, California, Massachusetts, Texas, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. The Bring Our Families Home campaign is a family-led initiative funded by the Foley Foundation.
The Foundation began its work advocating for American hostages and reporter safety in 2014, just 16 days after American journalist James Foley was murdered by ISIS in Syria while covering the civil war.
The concept of the portraits was meant to use the power of art and communicate the humanity behind each individual story.
One of those stories is Zach Shahin, an American businessman arrested in the United Arab Emirates in March 2008. In 2017, a Dubai court sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in prison for a white-collar crime without any evidence, according to his sister-in-law Aida Dagher. Like many families in the campaign, Dagher gave up her career and has worked endlessly to bring her brother-in-law home.
“This is his 19th year,” Dagher said. “We’ve been fighting all the time to get him out. We’re hoping the U.S. government is doing what they should, the UAE government as well. We’re hoping that now finally they will compromise, settle, whatever it takes to release them.”
Wrongfully Detained Americans Overseas
Wrongfully Detained Americans Overseas public.flourish.studio
A Flourish data visualization by Jacques Abou-Rizk
Campbell said the murals are meant to make people stop to think about the scale of what he calls the American hostage crisis.
“It’s hopeful because you look at all those stickers of people coming home, and they far outnumber the people that are still in detainment,” he said. “And that could be the same result for these other families that are in detainment, and hopefully will be, that they’ll come home.”
Among those involved is Ryan Fayhee, a former federal prosecutor and board member of the Foley Foundation who now conducts pro-bono work for families of those wrongfully detained abroad. His pro bono work began with Paul Whelan in 2018, a veteran arrested in Russia for alleged espionage, before being released as part of a United States-Russia prisoner swap in 2024. He now represents Valizadeh, who is being held in Evin Prison in Tehran.
“He’d already been in Evin Prison last July when the Israeli strike targeted the prison,” Fayhee said. “With a continuing blackout in Iran and threats from the IRGC to his family, we really haven’t been able to communicate in any way, and that’s deeply concerning.”
But Fayhee expressed hope over the changing landscape of American hostage and detainee recovery over the past decade. In 2015, after Foley’s murder, President Barack Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 30, which created the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and restructured U.S. policy toward terrorist negotiations. In 2020, Congress passed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which codified some of the processes set up in the policy directive.
“Even from the time when I began doing work of this sort with Paul Whelan and his family… we’re just light years ahead of where we were in terms of the resources, the personnel, the engagement, the willingness to resolve,” Fayhee said.
Dagher, who lives in Texas, stressed the importance of the Foley Foundation and the campaign in bringing these families together.
“[Zach Shahin’s] wife cries every single day for the last 18 years,” Dagher said. “That’s why I left my career… But I think finally we’ll get him out. I feel that this year they will be out.”
Jacques Abou-Rizk is a graduate student journalist at Northwestern Medill.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.