Maryam Tahmasebi is a professor of psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College. On April 9, she was teaching a class when her son texted her that his father hadn’t picked him up from school and wasn’t answering his phone. She picked her son up, went home, and called the police, terrified something violent had happened to her husband. In her own words, published in The Nation from inside a Texas detention facility: “Even so, it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards.”
Her husband, Eissa Hashemi, had been detained by ICE that day. Within days, so had she and their teenage son — a kid who has attended school in California since pre-K and speaks only English, now sitting in federal custody trying to understand why the only country he’s ever known has locked him up.
THE ACTUAL REASON, STATED PLAINLY BY THE GOVERNMENT ITSELF
This isn’t a case where the government alleges any crime, any security threat tied to the family’s own conduct, or any violation of their immigration status. The administration’s own public statements make the actual basis explicit: Eissa Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, a former Iranian vice president who, in 1979, served as the English-language spokeswoman for the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for over a year — the same “Screaming Mary” the government’s own social media posts and press statements center the entire case around.
On April 11, Secretary of State Rubio announced the revocation of green cards for Hashemi, Tahmasebi, and their son, citing Hashemi’s relationship to his mother. Not his own conduct. His relationship. A DHS spokesperson told Newsweek their presence in the U.S. posed “a clear threat to our national security and foreign policy” — with no allegation the family had done anything themselves. Hashemi entered the U.S. legally on an F-1 student visa in 2014; the family became green card holders in 2016, under visas issued during the Obama administration, and lived here without incident for a decade.
Tahmasebi’s own account is direct: “I was beyond shocked to realize that an online smear campaign without any merit or legal standing had convinced the US government to try to revoke our green cards overnight without due process or even telling us. The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son” of his mother.
MORE THAN FOUR MONTHS, SEPARATED, WITH NOWHERE TO GO
This isn’t a brief detention. As of this week, the family has been held for over four months. Despite all three being detained at the same Dilley, Texas facility, Hashemi has been kept separated from his wife and son the entire time — allowed only 10 minutes of supervised phone contact every two weeks, according to Tahmasebi’s account. When she asked for the family to be reunited, she says she was told family separation “was the policy and the rule” in their specific case.
Here’s the detail that should be the actual headline: the family requested voluntary departure — they offered to leave the United States themselves, entirely on their own terms, ending the entire dispute immediately. The government blocked it, and attorneys say officials have indicated they’d appeal any order allowing the family to leave. This is worth sitting with directly: the administration isn’t just detaining a family it claims poses a security risk — it’s actively fighting to keep that same family from simply going away voluntarily, which is the outcome you’d expect an actual security-driven removal process to want most.
Both Tahmasebi and Hashemi work as educators. Both, in her account, have spent their careers mentoring PhD students — including U.S. military veterans. Neither has a criminal record. Not even a traffic ticket.
WHY THIS SHOULD MATTER TO EVERYONE, REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IRAN
This is what the IBTimes coverage accurately termed “bloodline punishment”: a legal doctrine, applied through executive action with no judicial finding of any wrongdoing, that holds a person’s U.S. immigration status hostage to a family member’s conduct that occurred before that person was even born. Tahmasebi herself has no blood relationship to Ebtekar at all — she married into a family whose history predates her by decades, and she’s been detained for it regardless. If this theory survives — if the government can revoke a green card and detain a family with zero due process based purely on a relative’s decades-old political history, rather than the actual person’s own conduct — that’s not a policy that stays confined to families with ties to the 1979 hostage crisis. It’s a precedent for punishing anyone based on who their family happens to be.