'Bloodline punishment': Iranian family faces ongoing punitive ICE detention
A Los Angeles-based Iranian family has spent over 130 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention to date due to their relative’s political activity nearly 50 years ago.
In a letter published in The Nation, Iranian academic Maryam Tahmasebi described the arrest and detention of her husband, Eissa Hashemi, their 16-year-old son and herself, as "bloodline punishment" as the three permanent residents were stripped of their green cards following an online campaign.
Neither of the three family members has any criminal history.
"The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born," Tahmasebi wrote, referring to the 1979 crisis wherein 53 Americans were held captive by militant student groups in Tehran.
Hashemi is the son of former Iranian politician Masoumeh Ebtekar, who was involved in the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis in Tehran.
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Hashemi, also an academic, was arrested on 9 April and taken to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas, where he is currently detained.
Tahmasebi and her son, who spent most of his life in California, were arrested the following day on the way to the son’s school.
The two have been detained in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, an ICE detention facility mainly holding women and children in South Texas.
Lawmakers and community activists have been advancing calls to shut down the for-profit detention centre, due to documentation of mistreatment and traumatising conditions, especially against detained children.
Although Tahmasebi requested to be reunited with her husband in detention, she was told that "family separation is the policy and the rule", according to her letter.
The family even requested voluntary departure from the United States, a legal procedure that allows those in deportation proceedings to voluntarily leave the country, but this request was barred by the government, Tahmasebi wrote.
Tala Alfoqaha, an attorney for the family, told Middle East Eye that the government's moves to block the family from voluntary departure had "shown that their detention is not being done for any legitimate purpose, but is purely punitive".
"This is a case that stands for the idea that you can do every single thing right and still end up in ICE detention," Alfoqaha added.
'This is a case that stands for the idea that you can do every single thing right and still end up in ICE detention'
- Tala Alfoqaha, attorney
"They're not being detained on the basis of what they've done, but who they are as Iranians with parents who've lived and worked."
The Department of Homeland Security described the three family members as "individuals whose presence in the United States posed a clear threat to our national security and foreign policy", according to a statement given to NBC Los Angeles.
Alfoqaha told MEE that the case is "reminiscent of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, where people were detained just on the basis of their identity and belonging to a nation that the US viewed as a target in that moment".
"If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone," Tahmasebi said in the closing line of her letter from detention.
As of December, at least 577 Iranian nationals were being held in ICE detention facilities, as part of ongoing political retaliation in light of the US war on Iran.
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