Amid a series of crackdowns on Iranians allegedly close to the Islamic Republic’s political establishment, the United States on Saturday said Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated the green card status of three individuals linked to a key figure in the Iran hostage crisis.
The individuals, Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son, are now in the custody of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending their removal from the country, a press release from the US Department of State read. The announcement comes against the backdrop of the US and Iran to end the six-week war.
They had entered the United States in 2014 during the Obama administration. And they were granted lawful permanent resident (LPR) status via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program in 2016, months after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized two US Navy vessels and captured 10 sailors, the release said.
Diving into familial connections, the Department said that Eissa Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, an Iranian political figure who rose to prominence during the Iran hostage crisis.
Known by the media moniker ‘Screaming Mary’, Ebtekar was reportedly the spokeswoman of the group of students who stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, months after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, a period defined by strong anti-American sentiment.
The group, Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, had held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, marking one of the longest-running diplomatic crises in history that set the course of US-Iran relations for decades. The State Department said that Ebtekar was a leading propagandist who “perpetrated” the crisis.
As the lead spokesperson and media intermediary for the hostage-takers, Ebtekar “crafted propaganda falsely showing the humane treatment of the hostages, arranging staged interviews in which the American hostages were pressured to describe their treatment in positive terms.”
The Department noted that the hostages were being held in solitary confinement, blindfolded and starved, and subjected to “physical and psychological terror, including beatings and mock executions.”
Ebtekar married one of her fellow hostage-takers and went on to hold cabinet-level positions in the Iranian government. She became the country’s first woman to serve as vice president, leading its Department of Environment from 1997 to 2005. She was the vice president for Women and Family Affairs from 2017 to 2021.
Last week, the State Department terminated the legal status of the niece and grandniece of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a US air strike in Iraq in 2020. and her daughter are now in the custody of ICE, the Department said.
Secretary Rubio also revoked the green cards of the daughter of Iran’s national security chief, Ali Larijani, who was killed in Israeli airstrikes last month. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani and her husband, Seyed Kalantar Motamedi, are no longer in the US and are barred from future entry, the release noted.
