WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State seized a region of northern Iraq where people of different religions and ethnic groups had coexisted since biblical times, and sought to cleanse it of everyone who was not a Sunni Muslim. ISIS killed or enslaved thousands of Yazidis and massacred Shiite Muslims. The group readily admitted that it wanted to eradicate Christianity from the Middle East. In a matter of days, more than 100,000 Iraqi Christians had fled their homes, mostly to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Last year, as an official of the Obama administration, I walked through a Christian neighborhood of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, to the beautiful St. Joseph’s cathedral, where I met with leaders of every major Christian denomination in Iraq, including the patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East and the archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church. I also visited the Yazidi mountain shrine of Lalish, and the town of Alqosh, just a few miles north of Islamic State-controlled Mosul, where a synagogue still stands, unused for now, but protected by a local Christian family and the Muslim fighters of the Kurdish pesh merga.

Every religious leader I met asked that the United States keep the door open to refugees from their communities. But what they wanted most of all was our help in enabling their people to stay safe on their ancestral lands in Iraq. One group, the Assyrian Church of the East, felt so strongly about this that it made the brave decision to move its headquarters from Chicago back to Erbil.

I would never say that we have done enough to help persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East. How could anyone say they have done enough when so many are still suffering? But to suggest, as the Trump administration now does, that the United States has done nothing, and use this falsehood to justify favoring Christians over others among our refugee admissions, is outrageous. (On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the president’s executive order, including this element.)