The arrest was supposed to humiliate and expose the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic. Instead, it ruined the lives of a family fleeing from the theocracy.
On April 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he had revoked the green cards of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s niece and grand-niece, who had pushed “propaganda for Iran’s terrorist regime while enjoying a lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles” and were now in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. The New York Post ran a cover story and several other articles about the “sex appeal” of Soleimani’s alleged grand niece, featuring her bikini photos.
The story sounded too good to be true—because it wasn’t. The alleged niece, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, are not actually related to the late general, documents obtained by Drop Site show. Soleimani Afshar’s father was an only child whose parents died before the general was born, in an entirely different part of Iran. In fact, Soleimani Afshar was once jailed for protesting the Iranian government, and she fled Iran with her teenage daughter after Hosseiny appeared in a dance competition on a banned TV channel.
The New York Post did not respond to a request for comment from Reason.
Soleimani Afshar is suffering from a rare blood disorder, and Hosseiny is “basically just trapped in [ICE detention] watching her mom die,” family friend and U.S. military veteran Shawna Ruhland, who is running a GoFundMe for them, told Drop Site. The State Department refused to “comment on matters of classified intelligence.”
This “intelligence” may have come from conservative activist Laura Loomer, who posted on social media last month that “Qasem Soleimani’s Neice [sic]” was living in Los Angeles, and later took credit for reporting Soleimani Afshar to the State Department. Loomer shared “exclusive” screenshots of the supposed Iranian propaganda Soleimani Afshar had posted on Instagram: a fake news story about U.S. troops captured in Iran, a video about Gen. Soleimani’s rise and fall from an AI slop history page, and a photo of missiles captioned with a Persian joke about apologizing while beating someone up.
Confronted by Drop Site about Soleimani Afshar’s true identity, Loomer stated, “I want all Islamic immigrants deported.” Loomer has also taken credit for U.S. border officials detaining British journalist Sami Hamdi and Rubio banning Palestinian children from seeking medical treatment in American hospitals.
Like Loomer, the Trump administration has been unmoved by the claims of Iranians fleeing persecution, despite using that persecution to justify its war on Iran. Before the war, ICE deported several planeloads of Iranians, including Christian converts and openly gay people. In January 2026, after an Iranian government crackdown killed thousands of protesters, ICE deported 14 people directly to Iran. The administration claimed it was pursuing “terrorists, human smugglers and suspected foreign agents.”
Some relatives of Iranian officials were indeed living in America. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, a former medical professor at Emory University, is the daughter of the late Iranian National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani. Seyed Eissa Hashemi, a former adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles, is the son of former Iranian Vice President Masoumeh Ebtekar, who was also a spokeswoman for Iranian revolutionaries who stormed the U.S. Embassy in 1979.
Rubio had Hashemi detained and revoked Ardeshir-Larijani’s green card while she was outside the country. But these cases didn’t provide the Trump administration with a salacious trophy to parade around. Hashemi is a chubby middle-aged man, and Ardeshir-Larijani is an outwardly pious, hijab-wearing woman.
Instead, the administration seems to have latched onto a much more dubious case for political clout—and, ironically, ended up publicly humiliating two women over exactly the lifestyle they were persecuted for in Iran.
