Michelle Witte The Grayzone
A family of Iranian legal permanent residents was abducted and confined to an ICE prison after US government-backed regime change activist Masih Alinejad campaigned for their deportation. The family committed no crime, and was only targeted by Alinejad for their bloodline.
A family of Iranian legal permanent residents of the United States has delivered a harrowing story of persecution at the hands of the Trump administration to the Nation Magazine, explaining how they were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement starting on April 9, not because of any criminal history or immigration violation, but as the result of an “online smear campaign” that appears to have been orchestrated by the US government’s favorite, flower-sporting Persian regime change activist, Masih Alinejad.
In The Nation, Maryam Tahmasebi details the story of herself, her husband Eissa Hashemi and their high-school-age son, who live in California and have done so, legally, for many years. Tahmasebi and her husband are both professors; her at Los Angeles Pierce College and him at The Chicago School. Their son has been in the California school system since before kindergarten, and speaks only English, Tahmasebi says.
Yet they have all now been detained for more than 120 days in two separate immigration processing centers in Texas, hundreds of miles from the lives they’ve built, apparently because Washington’s Iran regime-change mascot, Masoumeh “Masih” Alinejad, decided to start harassing the California family over their bloodline.
Alinejad is an Iranian-American self-styled feminist activist known for lobbying for a US regime change war on her former country. A former Voice of America Persian News presenter who raked in close to $1 million in contracts with the US government broadcaster, she left Iran in 2009, where, according to leaked State Department cables, she had operated as a confidential US informant.
On April 1, Alinejad posted a video on X of the Hashemi family’s “luxury home” in Los Angeles in a video apparently addressed to Hashemi’s mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar. Ebtekar is an Iranian scientist and politician. She was also the translator for the Iranian student group which took over the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held dozens of American diplomats hostage, demanding that the recently deposed Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, be returned from the US to face justice in Iran.
Alinejad taunts Hashemi in the video for not publicly denouncing his own mother. Ironically, she also says, “In a free country like the US, your son has the freedom to say ‘I’m against my mother, who raided the US embassy.’”
In that supposedly free country, just over a week later, Hashemi was picked up by ICE agents with no warning or notification to his family. Tahmasebi says she only discovered where her husband was when his phone location showed him at an ICE facility in downtown Los Angeles. When they were able to speak, Tahmasebi says her husband told her he was under arrest but she and their son were fine.
That wasn’t true: the next day, in front of her son’s school, Tahmasebi says she and the boy were surrounded by Department of Homeland Security vehicles, handcuffed, and detained.
Now, they sit in Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center, still separated from Hashemi, who is being detained in another center. She writes of the pain of not only being separated from her husband, but of learning that in her adopted country, “not only do your own ideas and academic achievements not matter, but you are somehow now responsible for decisions you never made, and for things that happened before you were ever born. That you don’t have an identity of your own, and that your existence can be negated based on relations. This is bloodline punishment.”
Alinejad has been gloating about the fruits of her campaign of retribution for years. In a statement made days after the family was picked up, she praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the move, and criticized the Biden administration for not using her list of the relatives of Iranian officials living in America to enact a political witchhunt.
Alinejad made a mistake in her self-congratulatory post, however. She said that the family with the offending bloodline was going to be removed from the US. That is not the case, according to Tahmasebi. She says even after making the difficult choice to request to leave the life they’d built in the US, their American captors opposed the idea and even suggested they’d fight any court decision that would allow the family to leave.
“In other words, they want to continue our indefinite detention without any end in sight. But for what purpose?” Tahmasebi cannot come up with an answer. She is instead asking anyone with a conscience to help them out of their nightmare. She also says she’s realized the rule of law in America, which she says she put faith in, has proven to be a fiction.
“If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone,” she cautions.
Alinejad, meanwhile, continues to do the administration’s dirty work by smearing Palestinian rights activists as terrorist sympathizers and fear-mongering about Sharia law in Europe. The self-described freedom fighter seems only interested in the freedoms of select dissident groups from the US empire’s list of usual suspects – Russia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Belarus, and, of course, Iran – all of whom got a mention in her announcement of the new World Liberty Congress location in Berlin, a city once again making a name for itself by silencing Jews and anyone else who attempts to speak for Palestinian rights. She also unironically complains about Iran’s supposed targeting of dissidents in other countries, all while encouraging the US to target her enemies wherever they are.
Alinejad began the year by “singing, screaming” her support for the US and Israel’s attack on Iran and calling the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei “a dream.” The self-proclaimed women’s rights activist had chided the Biden administration for not supporting the active killing of Iranians as enthusiastically as it did the extermination of Palestinians, but has found a true partner in the Trump administration, even bragging about US President Donald Trump sharing her social media posts.
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