The United States revoked the green cards of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi and their son on April 11, 2026, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the family ahead of deportation. The move targeted the relatives of an Iranian regime propagandist known as “Screaming Mary.”
Marco Rubio said their family “should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country” and added that “America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families — and under the Trump Administration, it never will.”
The case carries unusual weight because Hashemi and Tahmasebi both worked as professors at The Chicago School in Los Angeles, and because Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar. Ebtekar was the spokeswoman for the students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for over a year. She later served as a vice president for women and family affairs from 2017 to 2021 and twice led Iran’s Department of Environment.
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The family came to the United States on a visa issued in 2014 and was granted lawful permanent resident status in 2016 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, which the Trump administration ended in December 2025. The State Department said the family of Ebtekar is the latest of several families with ties to Iran deported by the Trump administration during recent weeks.
That broader campaign has already reached the relatives of other prominent Iranian figures. Earlier this month, the niece and grand-niece of the late Revolutionary Guard Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani were arrested after their lawful permanent resident status was terminated. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were living in Los Angeles when ICE took them into custody, and the State Department said she is an outspoken supporter of the totalitarian, terrorist regime in Iran. The department also terminated the legal status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani and her husband; she is the daughter of former Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani, and the pair are no longer in the United States.
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The timing matters because the deportations are unfolding while U.S. officials are under pressure to manage the wider confrontation with Iran. Early Saturday, Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Islamabad for high-stakes talks over the war in Iran amid a fragile two-week truce. For the administration, the deportations send a domestic message now, even as the diplomatic and military picture abroad remains unsettled.
