Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked the lawful permanent resident status of three foreign nationals tied to a spokeswoman for the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the State Department announced Saturday. The individuals, Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son, are now in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and face removal from the country.
The move targets the family of Masoumeh Ebtekar, whom Rubio identified as the public face of the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran more than four decades ago. Ebtekar served as spokeswoman for the captors who held 52 Americans for 444 days, a period Rubio said included "beatings, starvation, and mock executions."
That the family of an Iranian regime figure tied to one of the most infamous attacks on American sovereignty was living in the United States on green cards at all raises a question Washington rarely likes to answer: how did they get here in the first place?
Rubio, writing on X, laid the blame squarely on the previous Democratic administration. He said the Obama administration granted visas in 2014 to Ebtekar's son and his family to enter the United States. Then, in June 2016, Just the News reported, the same administration gave them lawful permanent resident status through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
The Diversity Visa Program, better known as the "green card lottery", awards up to 50,000 immigrant visas annually by random selection. That a family connected to one of Iran's most prominent hostage-crisis figures could obtain permanent residency through that program speaks to the kind of vetting gaps that critics of the lottery system have warned about for years.
Rubio was blunt about the failure. He wrote that Ebtekar's family "should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country."
The revocations did not happen in isolation. AP News reported that Rubio determined this week that at least four Iranian nationals connected to the current or former Iranian government were no longer eligible for green cards or U.S. visas. Among them: Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, relatives of former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Qassem Soleimani, who were arrested by immigration authorities and face deportation.
The State Department also revoked the visas of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, daughter of former Iranian national security adviser Ali Larijani, and her husband. Earlier actions targeted several Iranian diplomats and staffers at Iran's U.N. mission in New York.
The pattern is clear. Rubio is using State Department authority to systematically strip immigration benefits from individuals tied to Iran's ruling apparatus, a posture consistent with the Trump administration's broader pressure campaign against Tehran.
Newsmax reported that the State Department described the coordinated actions with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE as aimed at "keeping Americans safe." The outlet framed the arrests as part of a broader Trump administration policy tying aggressive immigration enforcement to national security concerns involving hostile foreign regimes.
The Secretary of State did not mince words about the principle at stake. In his X post, Rubio declared:
"America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families, and under the Trump Administration, it never will."
That language echoed a separate post in which he said, as Breitbart reported, "The Trump administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes."
Rubio has emerged as the administration's most visible enforcer on this front. His willingness to personally drive revocation decisions, naming names, citing specific visa histories, and publicly tying the actions to past policy failures, marks a sharp departure from the cautious, process-heavy approach that defined the State Department under prior administrations.
That assertiveness has been on display in other arenas as well. Rubio's appearance at the Munich Security Conference earlier signaled the same instinct: direct, unapologetic, and aligned with the president's priorities.
For younger readers, the name Masoumeh Ebtekar may not ring a bell. But for the Americans who lived through November 1979, she is unforgettable. Ebtekar, known to the hostages and the press as "Screaming Mary", was the English-language spokeswoman for the militants who overran the American embassy compound in Tehran. She appeared on Western television defending the captors' actions while 52 Americans endured 444 days of captivity.
Ebtekar went on to serve in senior positions in the Iranian government, including as a vice president. The fact that her son's family was able to obtain U.S. residency during the Obama years, through a visa lottery, no less, is the kind of detail that makes ordinary Americans question whether anyone in Washington was paying attention.
Congressional Republicans have long pushed to reaffirm Iran's designation as a top state sponsor of terror, and the Ebtekar family's visa history gives that effort a concrete, human-scale example of what lax vetting can produce.
Several details remain unclear. The name and age of Hashemi and Tahmasebi's son have not been publicly disclosed. The specific ICE facility where the three are being held has not been identified. And it is not yet known whether a formal removal order or court filing accompanied the revocations, or whether the action rested solely on the Secretary of State's determination.
Nor has any response from the affected individuals or their legal representatives surfaced. Whether they will challenge the revocations in court, and on what grounds, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the broader question of how many other foreign nationals with ties to hostile regimes hold U.S. green cards or visas remains unanswered. The Senate's recent refusal to strip the president's Iran-related authorities suggests congressional Republicans intend to give the administration room to keep pressing.
Rubio's actions this week send an unmistakable signal: the days when the families of America's declared enemies could quietly collect the benefits of American residency are over. The real question is why it took this long.
