Since the 1990s, Coptic Orthodox Christians have immigrated to the United States from Egypt in greater frequency, through the Diversity Visa (or Green Card Lottery), asylum, and family reunification. After the Arab Spring, mainstream and Christian media sources as well as Copts viewed this migration as a response to the increase in attacks against Middle Eastern Christians. ISIS’s specific targeting of the Copts since 2015 coincided with an increasing transnational interest in the plight of Christians globally. The Trump administration has focused policy on aiding persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and Copts have contributed to the imaginary of such initiatives. The language of persecution and extinction shapes discourse and policy of American political and religious leaders, and such leaders have argued that the United States is the only hope for “saving” Middle Eastern Christians from complete decimation. My paper analyzes how American concerns with Islamic terrorism and policies oriented toward such concerns have impacted upon the Coptic community in both Egypt and the United States. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork between the village of Bahjura, Upper Egypt and the New York-New Jersey area, I explore how new waves of Coptic migration to the U.S., post-Arab Spring, have helped to spur advocacy efforts on the plight of Middle Eastern Christians from American politicians and evangelical organizations. Renewed Western efforts to “save” Middle Eastern Christians has furthered the post-Cold War remapping of the world into a civilizational battle between Christianity and Islam. For this theo-political project’s success, intra-Christian doctrinal and theological difference has been reconciled or ignored for the sake of shared political goals. The embrace of Copts by Christian conservatives and the U.S. state has in turn placed them in a fraught, contradiction-laden predicament: in these developing geopolitical contexts, the death and decimation of Middle Eastern Christians by revolution, war, and upheaval are constructed as exemplary of the danger of Muslims and Islam globally. Thus, while Coptic racial difference—as a Middle Eastern community—places them into vectors of solidarity with other people of color, and with those communities who have been targets of the post-9/11 racial infrastructure, Copts have been compelled to distance themselves from such communities by American religious and political forces whose support hinges on their special status as Middle Eastern Christian victims of Islamic violence.