On Saturday, the U.S. State Department said immigration agents arrested Qassem Soleimani’s niece, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, and her daughter after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked their U.S. green cards. The department said Afshar and her daughter were taken into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, and it also said Afshar’s husband was banned from entering the United States.
The State Department said the latest actions were part of determinations Rubio made this week affecting Iranian nationals connected to Iran’s current or former government. The department said the affected people had their green cards or U.S. visas revoked, including two whom immigration authorities had detained and who were to be deported.
In a posting on X, Rubio said Afshar was “an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime who celebrated attacks on Americans and referred to our country as the ‘Great Satan.’” The posting added that “The Trump administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes,” according to the State Department’s description of his remarks.
The department also said Afshar and her daughter had been living a “lavish lifestyle” in Los Angeles for many years while publicly supporting the Iranian government and anti-American attacks, according to the State Department. The Iranian mission to the United Nations did not provide comment Saturday, the report said.
Afshar and her daughter were described as among several Iranian nationals whose legal status in the U.S. Rubio has rescinded. The State Department said Rubio recently revoked the visas of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, described as an academic and the daughter of Ali Larijani, who was killed in a U.S.-Israel airstrike last month, and that Ardeshir-Larijani and her husband, Seyed Kalantar Motamedi, were no longer in the United States, the report said.
The State Department said its earlier visa actions involved diplomats and staffers at Iran’s mission to the United Nations. It said the agency revoked or declined to renew visas of several Iranian officials, including the deputy ambassador, in early December—before what it called the surge of anti-government protests in Iran and the start of the war—according to the report.
The State Department said that on Friday it had told reporters that action had been taken on Dec. 4, but it declined to comment further “for privacy and security reasons,” except to say the decision was not related to the protests or the war, the report said.