Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this Saturday the revocation of the permanent residency of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, his wife Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son, who are currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awaiting deportation to Iran.
The measure was justified due to Hashemi's family ties with his mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, known as "Screaming Mary," who was the English spokesperson for the Islamist students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Rubio described Ebtekar as a spokesperson for Islamic terrorists who subjected the hostages to beatings, hunger, and mock executions, and pointed out that her family should never have been granted the privilege of living in the United States, according to Fox News.
"Your family should never have been able to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country," Rubio wrote on his social media account X.
The Hashemi family entered the United States in 2014 with visas granted by the Obama administration, and in June 2016, they obtained permanent residency through the Diversity Visa Program, commonly known as the visa lottery.
Rubio directly pointed to the Obama administration for facilitating that process: "In 2014, the Obama administration granted visas to his son and his family to enter the United States. In June 2016, the Obama administration granted them legal permanent resident status through the Diversity Visa Program."
According to CBS News, Seyed Eissa Hashemi and his wife Maryam Tahmasebi were working as professors at The Chicago School, an institution located in Los Angeles, before they were detained.
The arrests on April 11 are part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration against individuals with ties to the Iranian regime.
On the same day, Rubio also revoked the immigration status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, daughter of the former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Ali Larijani, and her husband Seyed Kalantar Motamedi, who were no longer in the country and face a ban on entry.
This Friday, ICE arrested Hamideh Soleimani Afshar in Los Angeles, the niece of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, along with her daughter.
Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was eliminated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
The Diversity Visa Program, created in 1990 and which grants 55,000 permanent residencies annually to citizens of countries with low immigration rates to the U.S., was suspended by Trump in December 2025 following a shooting at Brown University carried out by an immigrant who had entered the country through that program.
Masoumeh Ebtekar, who was 19 years old when she participated in the embassy takeover, was chosen as a spokesperson due to her fluency in English, which she acquired during her childhood in Philadelphia, where her father studied at the University of Pennsylvania. She later had a political career in Iran and served as the Vice President for Women’s Affairs and Family.
"America can never become a home for anti-American terrorists or their families, and under the Trump administration, it never will be," Rubio concluded in his message.
Filed under: