RUBIO MOVES TO DEPORT FAMILY TIED TO THE 1979 IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS — “THEY SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ALLOWED IN” — AND THE FALLOUT IS ERUPTING…
RUBIO MOVES TO DEPORT FAMILY OF IRAN HOSTAGE-CRISIS SPOKESWOMAN — BUT VIRAL 'ISLAMIC TERRORISTS' HEADLINE GOES TOO FAR
Secretary of State Marco Rubio did take an extraordinary immigration action against three Iranian lawful permanent residents tied by family to one of the most infamous figures from the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage crisis.
But the viral headline now resurfacing online — “Marco Rubio DEPORTS Islamic Terrorists!” — compresses several different facts into a claim that is stronger than the public record supports.
Rubio announced on April 11, 2026, that he had terminated the lawful permanent resident status of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Hashemi’s wife Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son. Federal agents had taken the three into custody, and the State Department said they were being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending removal from the United States.
The family had entered the United States on visas issued in 2014 and obtained lawful permanent resident status in June 2016 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the English-speaking spokeswoman for the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
That family connection is real. What is not established is that Hashemi, Tahmasebi or their teenage son personally participated in terrorism, committed crimes in the United States or have already been deported.
The accurate headline is that Rubio revoked or terminated the family’s permanent-resident status and the three were detained pending removal. Calling the three relatives themselves “Islamic terrorists” is not supported by the public evidence.
This Is an April Story Resurfacing in August
The action was announced by the State Department on April 11, not at the end of August.
The story has resurfaced because the family remains in immigration detention and has continued fighting the government in federal court.
By mid-August, Tahmasebi said she and her 16-year-old son had spent more than 120 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, while Hashemi was being held separately at the South Texas Detention Facility in Pearsall.
A federal habeas case challenging the detention remains active, with docket activity continuing into late August.
That timeline makes the word “deports” especially misleading in the present tense. The administration is seeking removal, but the available record shows that the family was still detained and litigating rather than already expelled from the country.
“Pending removal” is not the same thing as “already deported.” As of the latest public court and reporting record, the family remained in ICE custody while contesting the government’s action.
Rubio’s Statement Was Real and Extremely Strong
Rubio’s own language left no doubt about how the administration viewed the case.
He identified Ebtekar by the nickname “Screaming Mary” and described her as the spokeswoman for the Islamist militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Rubio noted that the hostage-takers held 52 Americans for 444 days and said the hostages were subjected to beatings, starvation and mock executions.
He then said that the Obama administration had admitted Hashemi and his family in 2014 and granted them lawful permanent residence in 2016.
Rubio said he had terminated their permanent-resident status and declared that Ebtekar’s family should never have benefited from what he called the extraordinary privilege of living in the United States.
He closed with a sweeping message: America, he said, should never become a home for anti-American terrorists or their families.
Who Was Masoumeh Ebtekar?
Ebtekar was one of the most recognizable public faces of the 1979 hostage crisis.
Fluent in English, she acted as spokeswoman and media intermediary for the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, the revolutionary group that seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4, 1979.
The crisis lasted until January 20, 1981.
Fifty-two American hostages were ultimately held for 444 days.
The State Department’s 2026 statement accused Ebtekar of helping craft propaganda that portrayed the hostages as being treated humanely while they endured severe physical and psychological abuse.
She later became a senior Iranian government official, including service as head of Iran’s Department of Environment and as vice president for women and family affairs from 2017 to 2021.
The Hostage Crisis Was a Grave Attack on the United States
There is little serious dispute about the brutality and illegality of the embassy seizure.
The hostages were held against their will for more than a year.
Former hostages described blindfolding, isolation, physical abuse, threats and mock executions.
The seizure became one of the defining foreign-policy disasters of the Carter presidency and permanently transformed U.S.-Iran relations.
Americans who view Ebtekar as having served as the public propagandist for that operation therefore have a strong historical basis for anger about her later prominence in the Iranian government.
The legitimate policy question is whether close relatives of senior figures associated with hostile regimes should have received U.S. immigration benefits.
That question can be asked forcefully without transferring the underlying offense from Ebtekar and the hostage-takers to relatives who were not shown to have participated in it.
Family relationship is evidence of a relationship. It is not, by itself, proof that the relative committed the acts of the family member.
What the Government Says About the Three Relatives
The State Department described Hashemi, Tahmasebi and their son as Iranian nationals with ties to the Iranian regime.
DHS said their presence in the United States posed a threat to national security and foreign policy.
The administration has therefore treated the family connection as more than a mere biographical detail.
But the public government statements released with the arrests did not accuse the three of participating in the 1979 embassy seizure.
They did not announce terrorism charges against them.
They did not identify a criminal conviction by Hashemi, Tahmasebi or their teenage son.
And the statements did not publicly lay out individualized terrorist activity by each member of the family.
The administration has asserted national-security and foreign-policy concerns. That is different from proving in court that the three detainees are terrorists.
The Family Says This Is 'Bloodline Punishment'
Tahmasebi has publicly described the case in dramatically different terms.
In an August essay written from immigration detention, she said that she, her husband and their son were lawful permanent residents who had built careers and a life in the United States.
Tahmasebi is a psychology and statistics professor associated with Los Angeles Pierce College, while Hashemi has worked in higher education in the Los Angeles area.
She said the family had no criminal record and argued that the government was punishing them for the actions and political history of Hashemi’s mother.
Their lawyers have similarly characterized the case as “bloodline punishment” and have challenged the legality of the detention in federal court.
Those claims are the family’s legal and factual position. They do not automatically invalidate the government’s national-security determination, but they are a necessary part of any accurate account of the dispute.
The 16-Year-Old Son Makes the Viral Label Especially Problematic
The family’s son was reported to be 16 years old in August.
He was therefore born decades after the 1979 hostage crisis.
Whatever view one takes of the administration’s authority to remove him with his parents, describing a teenage child as one of the “Islamic terrorists” deported by Rubio would require evidence of terrorist conduct by that child.
No such public evidence has been identified.
A political headline that uses the crimes of the grandmother’s generation to label the grandson a terrorist collapses a legal distinction that should not be ignored.
The Obama-Era Immigration Timeline Is Confirmed
One part of Rubio’s criticism is well supported by the government’s own immigration timeline.
The State Department said Hashemi, Tahmasebi and their son entered the United States in 2014 on visas issued during the Obama administration.
It further said they obtained lawful permanent resident status in June 2016 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
That means the federal government had years to evaluate their backgrounds before and after permanent residence was granted.
Rubio’s argument is that the family should never have received that benefit given its connection to Ebtekar and the Iranian regime.
Critics respond that lawful permanent residence is an individual legal status and should not be rescinded merely because a close relative had an infamous political history.
What Power Does Rubio Actually Have?
Immigration law gives the executive branch substantial authority over noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents.
The secretary of state has statutory responsibilities in visa matters and in certain foreign-policy-based grounds of inadmissibility and deportability.
One provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act makes a noncitizen deportable when the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe that the person’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign-policy consequences.
The law also contains protections and limitations when the government relies on lawful beliefs, statements or associations.
The State Department’s April public statement did not spell out every statutory subsection or evidentiary finding underlying the Hashemi family action.
That matters because a press release announcing a termination is not a substitute for the legal process through which removal is contested.
Lawful permanent residence is a powerful immigration status, but it is not absolute immunity from removal. At the same time, removal from the United States remains a legal process that can be challenged before immigration authorities and federal courts.
Green-Card Revocation and Removal Are Not the Same Step
The phrase “Rubio revoked their green cards” is understandable shorthand, but the legal mechanics are more complicated than physically canceling a plastic card.
A green card is evidence of lawful permanent resident status.
The administration announced that Rubio had terminated the family’s LPR status and ICE then detained them pending removal.
The family disputes the government’s authority and factual basis and has pursued habeas relief in federal court.
That continuing litigation is itself evidence that the government’s announcement did not eliminate every legal question with one social-media post.
Ultimately, detention, removability, relief from removal and the legality of the executive action can involve different administrative and judicial proceedings.
The Habeas Litigation Is Still Active
Court records show that Tahmasebi filed a federal habeas petition in the Western District of Texas in May.
Related family cases were consolidated.
The docket remained active through August, including briefing over detention and a request for bond.
On August 18, the court denied a bond motion without deciding the ultimate merits, explaining that the requested relief substantially overlapped with the final relief sought in the habeas case.
The court stated that the petition would be assessed and ruled on in due course.
That is important context because it shows the family's removal fight has not been reduced to a completed deportation.
The Strongest Case for Rubio Is a National-Security Vetting Argument
Supporters of Rubio do not need to call the three detainees terrorists to make a serious argument.
Ebtekar was not an obscure distant relative.
She was a famous public face of the embassy seizure, later rose to senior positions in the Islamic Republic and remained a prominent regime figure for decades.
The United States has broad authority to scrutinize foreign nationals with close ties to senior officials of adversarial governments.
It is therefore reasonable for Congress, the State Department and DHS to ask how the family obtained U.S. visas and permanent residence, what was disclosed during vetting and whether any current relationships create legitimate security or foreign-policy concerns.
If the government possesses individualized evidence beyond kinship, it can present that evidence through the appropriate legal process.
The Weakest Case Is Guilt by Bloodline
The administration’s rhetoric becomes more legally and morally difficult when it implies that the conduct of one family member automatically establishes the dangerousness of another.
American law generally punishes people for their own conduct rather than inherited guilt.
The government can consider family relationships when those relationships are relevant to security, intelligence, immigration fraud or foreign-policy consequences.
But the existence of a notorious parent or grandparent does not itself prove that a professor, spouse or teenage child committed terrorism.
That distinction is especially important when the government is exercising the enormous power to detain a family for months and remove them from the country where they have lived for years.
Rubio's Broader Iran Crackdown Provides Context
The Hashemi family was not the only Iran-linked target of the administration’s 2026 immigration crackdown.
The State Department also terminated legal status for relatives of slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani.
It took action against Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of a senior Iranian national-security figure, and her husband.
The administration has framed these cases as part of a wider effort to prevent people tied to hostile foreign regimes from enjoying U.S. immigration benefits.
The policy reflects the Trump administration’s broader view that legal immigration privileges should be conditioned on national-security and foreign-policy interests far more aggressively than under previous administrations.
What Can Actually Be Said With Confidence
Marco Rubio did announce the termination of lawful permanent resident status for Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi and their son.
The three were taken into ICE custody in April 2026 and the government said they were being held pending removal.
Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman for the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Ebtekar later became a senior official in the Iranian government.
The State Department said the family entered the United States on visas in 2014 and received lawful permanent residence through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program in June 2016.
Rubio publicly said the family should never have received the privilege of living in the United States and said America should not become a home for anti-American terrorists or their families.
DHS said the three presented national-security and foreign-policy concerns.
However, the public record does not show that Hashemi, Tahmasebi or their teenage son were charged with terrorism or proved to have personally participated in the 1979 hostage crisis.
The family says it has no criminal record and argues that the government is imposing punishment based on bloodline. Their attorneys are contesting the detention and removal effort.
As of late August, the family remained in ICE custody and federal habeas litigation was still active.
So the viral headline requires two major corrections.
Rubio has moved to deport the family; he has not completed their deportation.
And the administration is targeting relatives of a notorious hostage-crisis spokeswoman on asserted national-security and foreign-policy grounds; it has not publicly established that the three relatives themselves are “Islamic terrorists.”
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The strongest defensible version of the story is still significant: the Trump administration is using immigration power aggressively against lawful permanent residents with close family ties to senior figures of the Iranian regime, and Rubio is openly arguing that those ties should have prevented them from receiving permanent residence in the first place.
Whether that policy survives the family’s legal challenge is a question for the immigration and federal courts, not for a viral headline to decide in advance.
