WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s increasing threats of military action against Iran have raised fears for the imprisoned Americans there his administration has sought to free. 

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its escorting warships arrived in the Middle East on Monday, widening Trump's options for attacking Iran over its massacre of anti-government protesters earlier this month. The US military buildup could serve as powerful leverage for the administration to press for the release of US citizens jailed in Iran, experts say, though the administration has said nothing publicly about the detainees as it prepares for Trump's pledged retaliation. 

The State Department's office for hostage affairs is formally tracking the cases of six Iranian-Americans held on what appear to be politically motivated charges. One source familiar with the detentions said that there are at least eight dual citizens who could be considered wrongfully detained, one of whom was released from prison and is on house arrest. 

The detained include Reza Valizadeh, a 49-year-old Iranian-American journalist who was arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in September 2024 in apparent retaliation for his reporting in the Persian-language outlet Radio Farda. Since Valizadeh’s December 2024 conviction of “collaborating with a hostile government,” he has been serving out most of his 10-year sentence in the notorious Evin Prison. The detention center in northern Tehran is believed to house thousands of prisoners, including political prisoners and dissidents, in squalid conditions. It was targeted in a deadly Israeli bombing in June.