But the administration’s Syria strikes stand apart. “In this particular decision,” he said, “I felt President Trump was right.”

For him, the conflict is personal: Sahloul was Assad’s classmate in the 1980s before Sahloul came to the United States, and his hometown of Homs has been a major site of conflict in the Syrian war. Until 2015, Sahloul led the Syrian American Medical Society, a coalition of doctors who provide medical aid in Syria and surrounding countries that are going through refugee crises. Sahloul has personally visited Syria to provide emergency medical support in the last several years, and the organization says it provided 3 million medical services in 2016.

“It’s very difficult to see children gassed to death while they’re asleep,” Sahloul said. “This continued for six years without any accountability. I felt this strike was sending a clear message to [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad].” On Twitter, Sahloul called out President Obama for his inaction: “How come that @realDonaldTrump was moved into military action by the images of children in Syria, while @POTUS44 was so stone-hearted?!” he wrote.

Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian American who runs an education-focused non-profit called the Karam Foundation, said she felt similarly betrayed by Obama. In 2013, there was evidence that the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its people. Despite Obama’s declaration that this crossed a “red line” that would bring consequences, he declined to take military action against Assad.

When reports of a chemical-weapons attack surfaced last week, Sergie Attar expected Trump to demur as well. “I was surprised and happy to know that we now have a president who is a president of action, who will be standing up to the regime,” she said. “On the one hand, nobody wants to welcome more bombs on their country. But on the other hand … this was a strike specifically targeting the Assad regime’s military base.”

As supportive as they are of Trump’s military action, both Sergie Attar and Sahloul worry about the consequences of his administration’s ban on admitting Syrian refugees to the U.S. “If you sympathize with the little babies who are being gassed, you should sympathize with the babies who are in tents who are the victims of Assad and ISIS,” Sahloul said.

Here lies the double-bind of U.S. aid organizations working on the crisis in Syria. “What we … see is this conundrum,” said Erol Kekic, the executive director of the immigration and refugee program at Church World Service, a coalition of largely mainline Protestant churches in the United States that works on refugee resettlement.

Some people want the government to “intervene in Syria and protect people who have been directly attacked by the regime, who are also fleeing from ISIS,” Kekic said. But “we’re also closing our borders and our doors and saying we do not want to resettle any more refugees.”