“Bloodline Punishment”: US Regime Jails Iranian-American Professors and Teen Son Over 1979 Revolution Ties
Washington weaponises ICE to punish law-abiding educators over ties to the 1979 Revolution.
Los Angeles, TX — In a stark display of the American regime’s hypocrisy and vindictiveness, a law-abiding Iranian-American family has been languishing in US immigration detention for over four months, targeted solely for their familial ties to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Maryam Tahmasebi, a psychology and statistics professor at Los Angeles Pierce College, and her husband, Eissa Hashemi, a professor of Business Psychology, were detained alongside their teenage son in April after the US State Department abruptly revoked their lawful permanent residency.
The couple, who have dedicated their lives to education and mentoring students—including US military veterans—had lived quietly in California for over a decade. They had no criminal records, not even a minor traffic violation. Yet, they were swept up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without prior notice or due process.
The true motive behind the family’s persecution was recently confirmed by US officials, who admitted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally terminated their green cards. The reason? Eissa Hashemi is the son of Dr. Masoumeh Ebtekar, a prominent figure in the Islamic Revolution who served as the English-language spokeswoman for the students who occupied the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and later served as Iran’s Vice President for Women and Family Affairs.
Tahmasebi described the ordeal as “bloodline punishment,” highlighting the US government’s vindictive pursuit of the descendants of those who stood against American imperialism. “I came here because I wanted to build a life for myself and my family that was defined by my own actions, not anyone else’s,” she wrote in a harrowing first-person account.
A Brutal Ordeal and Forced Family Separation
The nightmare began on April 9 when Hashemi failed to pick up his son from school. Assuming a medical emergency, Tahmasebi contacted the police, only to discover her husband had been snatched by ICE agents. The very next day, Department of Homeland Security vehicles surrounded her car as she was driving her son to school. She watched in horror as her teenage son was handcuffed.
The mother and son were subsequently transferred overnight from Los Angeles to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where they have now spent more than 120 days in captivity. Hashemi is being held in isolation at a separate facility, the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall.
US authorities have explicitly rejected requests to reunite the family, enforcing a cruel separation policy. Communication has been severely restricted, with Tahmasebi and her son allowed a mere 10 minutes of supervised conversation with Hashemi every two weeks.
The prolonged detention has inflicted severe psychological and physical trauma on the family. Their son, who has attended American schools since pre-kindergarten and considers the US his home, has been left deeply traumatised, unable to comprehend why he is being imprisoned in a cage.
When the family, broken by the indefinite and punitive nature of their detention, requested to voluntarily depart the United States, the US government aggressively opposed the move, signalling its intent to keep them locked up for political leverage.
“We are two working-class educators who had been living a working-class life in a rented apartment, and had never imagined anything like this happening to us,” Tahmasebi stated, issuing a desperate appeal for public support. “If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.”
The case lays bare the reality of the American “justice” system, where the veneer of the rule of law is easily stripped away to exact political revenge against the families of those who helped humble the US empire over four decades ago.
Reference: PressTv