LOS ANGELES _ Katy Kargosha worried her in-and-out flight from Iran to Los Angeles might look a little sketchy.
She had left her home in New Orleans two days earlier and flown to Tehran, where she would spend only four hours _ just long enough to pick up a severely disabled passenger before flying back to the United States.
Her passenger, frail and tired from the long trip, was a pug. Like him, Kargosha had once called Iran home. As her plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, Kargosha trembled with anxiety.
"I was sure they were going to ask, 'Why did you go to Iran for four hours?'" said Kargosha, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Iran. "I was worried I'd get in trouble. I was worried about the dog if they kept me for a thousand questions."
The dog had been abandoned beside a Tehran highway and was now being escorted by Kargosha to Los Angeles _ into the arms of The Pug Queen.
As relations between the U.S. and Iranian governments have deteriorated during Donald Trump's presidency, travelers increasingly have become pawns in the political tug of war amid talk of travel bans, sanctions and the nuclear agreement that Trump has called "the worst deal ever negotiated."
Last week, the Supreme Court affirmed parts of Trump's travel ban involving six Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. Much narrower than the president's original executive order, it would presumably not affect people who have "bona fide" connections in the U.S.
The ban went into effect Thursday night, drawing protesters and immigrant rights attorneys to LAX to assess the impact on travelers.
Weeks before the Supreme Court's decision, over Memorial Day weekend, Kargosha rushed to her homeland to get the dog on behalf of pug rescuer Izabella St. James. As a dual national, Kargosha can travel with relative ease, without the visa-processing delays and denials that have beset others.
The pug was whisked to the U.S. without a hitch. But the dog's rescue, amid uncertainty about the ban, illustrated the anxiety that accompanies traveling to Iran in the Trump era.
In the current environment, the possibilities of complications are greater if the Iranian traveling to the U.S. is a human being, said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, which advocates for better U.S.-Iran relations.
"It's astonishing that you have a greater chance of coming to the United States if you are a dog than if you are a relative of an American citizen," Parsi said.
