The United States revoked the green cards of the family of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, the Iranian regime propagandist known as “Screaming Mary,” on April 11, 2026, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Hashemi, his wife Maryam Tahmasebi and their son ahead of their deportation.
Hashemi and Tahmasebi both worked as professors at The Chicago School in Los Angeles. 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 family’s removal lands in a broader push by the Trump administration that has targeted several families with ties to Iran in recent weeks, even as the administration’s Middle East team arrived in Pakistan for diplomacy tied to the war in Iran and a fragile two-week truce. Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Islamabad early Saturday for talks, underscoring how the deportation campaign has moved ahead while U.S. officials are still trying to keep wider regional tensions from unraveling.
Read Also: Marco Rubio says family of Iranian propagandist should never have been admitted
Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the Iranian politician who first drew global attention as spokeswoman for the students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for over a year. Ebtekar later served as vice president for women and family affairs from 2017 to 2021 and twice led Iran’s Department of Environment. The State Department said Hashemi and his family came to the United States on a visa issued in 2014 and were granted lawful permanent resident status in 2016 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, which the Trump administration ended in December 2025.
The family’s case follows the earlier April arrest of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter after their lawful permanent resident status was terminated, and the State Department said Afshar was “an outspoken supporter of the totalitarian, terrorist regime in Iran.” It also comes after the legal status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani and her husband was terminated and the couple left the United States. For now, the latest removals show a fast-moving immigration campaign that is reaching beyond the people at its center and into their families, jobs and old political ties.
