When the United States celebrated the release of American pastor Andrew Brunson in October, Kubra Golge was hurt.

Like Brunson, her husband, former NASA scientist Serkan Golge, was detained in Turkey on what the U.S. government considers trumped-up charges, locked up during a family vacation.

“I was really disappointed,” she told POLITICO. “He’s still in prison.”

In fact, Golge is one of several Americans still being held in Turkey, some for dubious reasons. Several U.S. Consulate workers are also detained.

So human rights activists were struck when, a month after Brunson’s release, the Treasury Department lifted sanctions on senior Turkish officials. In exchange, Turkey also agreed to roll back its own penalties on two U.S. Cabinet heads. The move baffled those who say the U.S. has otherwise been working hard behind the scenes to free those still detained in Turkey.

“The Trump administration backed itself into a corner by using Magnitsky sanctions as a tool for securing Brunson’s release” — Amanda Sloat

“Equal force should have been applied,” said Eugene Chudnovsky, co-chair of the human rights-focused Committee of Concerned Scientists, which has advocated Golge’s release. “The committee’s a little upset by the fact that the effort on behalf of Golge has not been as strong as the effort on behalf of the pastor.”

Despite her initial dismay, Kubra Golge now feels that the administration is dedicated to negotiating with Turkey.

“They are really working for the other Americans in Turkey,” she said. “U.S. Consulate officials are very helpful, and often they’re contacting with me and they’re sharing their ideas with me, and I really appreciate their support.”

But some human-rights activists, Turkey experts and congressional staffers worry that the Trump administration gave up a critical piece of leverage when it repealed its penalties on Turkey, which were applied under the Global Magnitsky Act, a law that enables the U.S. government to punish foreigners for alleged human-rights abuses.

“The Trump administration backed itself into a corner by using Magnitsky sanctions as a tool for securing Brunson’s release,” Amanda Sloat, a senior fellow who studies Turkey at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an email.

A State Department spokesperson, who confirmed that a “small number” of U.S. citizens are still detained in Turkey, said, “We continue to raise these cases at the highest levels of our diplomatic conversations.”

But, the spokesperson added, “we will not forecast any possible future sanctions actions.”

The identities of the other U.S. citizens detained in Turkey have not been made public.

One congressional aide said the State Department has handled its sanctions approach well, noting that most detainees’ families — unlike Brunson’s — have opted to keep their cases quiet.

“Sanctions can always be reimposed for the other detained individuals as a last resort,” the aide wrote in an email, “and now Turkey has even more confirmation that the U.S. keeps its word and will lift those sanctions, too, if the individuals are released.”

But an Obama administration official criticized the strategy to tie sanctions to just one person, noting that Turkey has proved highly responsive to sanctions: “Every time we have been bold enough to use a stick, [Turkish leaders] respond within a few months’ time. … They respond [to sanctions] every single time, no matter who it is, where it is, when it is.”

Senators recently added language to an appropriations bill authorizing State to sanction any Turkish officials involved in unlawfully arresting U.S. citizens or Embassy workers.

But the former Obama official said efforts by diplomats and on the Hill likely won’t be enough until President Donald Trump gets involved — because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan often responds only to other heads of state.

Brunson’s detention became a diplomatic flash point in part thanks to efforts of religious freedom advocates and vocal members of Congress who pushed Vice President Mike Pence and others to help bring home the Christian evangelical pastor from North Carolina. He declined to comment for this article.

The case against Brunson was widely considered specious. But the same holds true for Golge, a dual citizen who was visiting Turkey on vacation in 2016 when he was arrested, as well as the three U.S. Consulate workers — Hamza Ulucay, Metin Topuz and Nazmi Mete Canturk. Turkey detained them all amid a vast crackdown on civil society that swept up tens of thousands of people after a 2016 coup attempt. Golge was charged with being a member of a terrorist organization, which was later reduced to aiding a terrorist organization.

“There’s a question about how premeditated it was, and then how much they just realized later that they had leverage as a result of these people that had gotten swept up in a massive dragnet,” another congressional staffer told POLITICO.

“Justice is very important, the most important thing in the world" — Kubra Golge

Sloat said Turkey likely targeted the local U.S. Consulate workers to use them “as a bargaining chip with the U.S.” in “hostage diplomacy.”

The U.S. has repeatedly pressed their cases with Turkish officials. It suspended most visa services in Turkey — and Turkey followed suit — for a couple of months late last year over the issue.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with the consulate workers’ family members during a visit to Ankara in October. He raised the issue in a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that month. But the negotiations — at least publicly — remain at an impasse.

Golge is the highest-profile American still in Turkish prison, where his sentence was recently cut from 7½ years to five. He has already spent two years behind bars, much of that time in solitary confinement. One major difficulty for the U.S. is that Turkey doesn’t recognize Golge’s U.S. citizenship since he’s a dual citizen, like many of the other detained individuals.

The Turkish Embassy directed questions about the ongoing detentions to the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. Turkey has previously claimed that Golge’s trial was fair and that Erdogan won’t interfere in the judiciary’s decisions.

A physicist who moved to the U.S. for school in 2003 and became a citizen in 2010, Golge was most recently researching how to get astronauts to Mars for NASA in Houston. Though NASA held his position open for two years, his boss eventually had to fill it, said Kubra Golge. His family has had to sell its car and house in Houston.

The strains in U.S.-Turkey relations go well beyond the detainees. The two countries have been at odds over support of various groups fighting in Syria, oil purchases from Iran and Istanbul’s request that the U.S. extradite a Turkish imam on charges that human rights activists call politically motivated. Erdogan in August also implored his citizens to boycott U.S. electronics and sell their U.S. dollars, further inflaming tensions between the two NATO allies. But Erdogan reportedly played a role in convincing Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria this month before and later invited the president to visit Turkey.

The latest source of friction was the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Erdogan has used the subsequent investigation to needle the U.S. over its support of Saudi Arabia, even though the country’s sudden support for the free press belies Turkey’s status as the world’s leading jailer of journalists.

“Whenever he’s given a card that he feels that he can play, he plays it,” the congressional staffer said.

That’s why the decision to lift Global Magnitsky Act sanctions after Brunson has some Turkey experts concerned the U.S. just folded a hand — on these detainees and on many Turks imprisoned on similar charges.

To Clyde Forsberg, an academic and a U.S. citizen who was detained in Turkey for several days shortly after the coup attempt, the U.S. has failed to stand up to Erdogan.

“Now it’s all about restoring relations with Turkey and getting back to this nonsense about what good friends the United States and Turkey are,” said Forsberg, who now teaches in Kyrgyzstan. “Erdogan knows very well that he can be absolutely outrageous and nobody will do anything. And it seems to me the longer that Americans are in prison in Turkey and their own country isn’t doing anything, that just gives Erdogan the green light” to do what he wants.

The ordeal has been taxing for Golge’s family, which has been staying in Turkey. Kubra Golge, who started taking antidepressants, is able to see her husband through a window panel once a week and face to face once a month. He told Kubra through tears that he hugs their kids in his dreams every night.

Their 2 1/2-year-old son thinks his father lives in a forest because the prison is surrounded by trees. When Kubra told their 8-year-old son to pray to God for his father’s release, she said he replied, “You know, Mom, when I grow up I want to be God, so that way I can save my daddy from prison.”

At times, Kubra worried that the U.S. was more focused on Brunson because he was Christian: “I felt like we are the step-citizens for America.”

But her more recent interactions with the State Department have reassured her about the U.S. commitment.

“Justice is very important, the most important thing in the world,” she said. “I am feeling this with my bones, with every cell of my body, and I will fight for that until the day I die.”

Nahal Toosi and Lorraine Woellert contributed to this report.