A Washington-based Iranian-American civic advocacy organization has initiated a landmark constitutional lawsuit against former U.S. President Donald Trump, demanding a federal court invalidate his ongoing military campaign against Iran as an unconstitutional overreach of executive power that bypassed required congressional authorization. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) Action, the group’s advocacy arm, filed the 16-page complaint for declaratory judgment on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represented by prominent constitutional scholars and attorneys Alan Morrison and Bruce Fein.
Lead counsel Morrison told reporters gathered at the National Press Club for the official announcement that the legal team would pursue the case through every available appellate level, regardless of early procedural hurdles. Morrison acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court has avoided ruling on core war powers questions throughout the nation’s 236-year history, but argued that the current circumstances present an unprecedented opportunity for judicial intervention. Notably, both the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-led House of Representatives already passed a bipartisan War Powers Resolution in June seeking to curb Trump’s authority to continue military operations against Iran, shifting the political landscape that has historically discouraged courts from taking up such cases. “This changed dynamic makes the court far more likely to accept our case and issue a binding ruling on the constitutionality of this war,” Morrison added.
In response to the June congressional War Powers Resolution, the Trump White House issued a formal statement claiming that no active hostilities were ongoing, asserting that all combat operations launched February 28, 2026 were formally terminated by a presidential ceasefire order issued April 7 the same year. Despite that official ceasefire declaration, fragile truce has broken down repeatedly, with the U.S. conducting sustained multi-day bombing campaigns across Iran’s southern coastal region earlier this month. One of those strikes hit a civilian wedding venue, killing and wounding dozens of non-combatant civilians.
NIAC President Jamal Abdi emphasized that Trump’s unauthorized war has exposed critical gaps in long-assumed checks and balances on executive war power, revealing that long-held guardrails were merely informal gentlemen’s agreements rather than enforceable constitutional limits. “This moment is not just about ending this ongoing catastrophe. It is about setting a binding precedent for the future, so no single president can drag our nation into war without explicit congressional approval,” Abdi told reporters. “This is a matter of life and death for innocent people on both sides, and it is long past time this fundamental constitutional question is settled once and for all.”
At the heart of the legal challenge is the Constitution’s explicit Declare War Clause, which grants sole authority to initiate war to the legislative branch, not the executive. NIAC legal team argues that Trump’s months-long bombing campaign directly violates this core constitutional separation of powers. For decades, however, the constitutional requirement for congressional war declaration has fallen into disuse: the U.S. now routinely conducts large-scale military operations, including targeted extrajudicial killings, across multiple sovereign nations without formal declarations. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, has been repeatedly stretched by successive administrations of both parties to justify open-ended military campaigns across the globe, many of which never deploy large ground combat forces. The executive branch has also gradually accumulated broad deference on foreign policy matters from both Congress and the courts over the past century.
Co-counsel Bruce Fein noted that the dispute over executive war authority requires judicial resolution: “The president claims he has unilateral authority to wage this war, and every other branch and most constitutional scholars disagree. That is exactly why we are in court—there is no other body that can settle this constitutional question definitively.” In recent weeks, the Trump administration has launched a coordinated messaging push led by Vice President JD Vance, ordering reporters to avoid labeling the military campaign a “war,” and instead refer to it as sporadic “hostilities” or “skirmishes.” Morrison pushed back sharply on this rhetoric: “If you have been bombing another country continuously for seven months, that is a war. If you enforce a full blockade and kill hundreds of civilians, that is a war. When you have already spent $44 billion on military operations, that is unequivocally a war.”
The lawsuit names eight Iranian-American plaintiffs who have suffered direct, personal harm from Trump’s bombing campaign, connecting their individual injuries to the legal challenge to establish standing for the court to hear the case. Kowsar Gowhari, one of the plaintiffs who spoke at Thursday’s press conference, lost four immediate family members in a U.S. strike, including a 70-year-old elderly cousin and a two-month-old infant. “I have an absolute responsibility as an American citizen to make sure their deaths are not forgotten and their loss does not go unanswered,” Gowhari said. “This is my country, I built my life here, and I cannot stand idle as my nation perpetuates this violence in violation of its own founding values. This war must end here, and it must end now.”
Another plaintiff, Nima Dilmaghani, reported that his cousin was severely injured when the commercial warehouse where she worked was destroyed in a U.S. bombing. The woman suffered a fractured leg, permanent eardrum damage, and the amputation and unsuccessful reattachment of her index finger, which has permanently lost all function. Ten of her coworkers were killed in the same strike. U.S. Army veteran Alan Band, another Iranian-American plaintiff, shared that his family living in northern Tehran has endured repeated nearby explosions that shook their home’s foundations, cut off access to clean water and electricity for weeks at a time, and left the entire family traumatized. Parveen Esmaeilzadeh’s in-laws remain at constant risk of new strikes, suffer from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and face catastrophic economic hardship. Her mother-in-law’s apartment building has sustained structural cracks from repeated blasts, and her nieces and nephews have not been able to attend a single day of school since the U.S.-Israeli joint campaign began February 28.
Abdi closed by framing the lawsuit as a test of core constitutional principles: “This lawsuit asks one fundamental question that goes to the heart of our democracy: can a single person, acting alone, decide to keep an entire nation at war without the consent of the people’s elected representatives?”