Marco Rubio is tearing a family apart for a crime committed before any of its younger members were born, holding them in a Texas detention cell as payment for a grievance forty-seven years cold. Eissa Hashemi, his wife Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son have lived in Los Angeles for a decade; three people who chose this country and built a life within it, now caged because the Secretary of State has decided that collective punishment is a legitimate instrument of American power, revoking their green cards over the political speech of Hashemi’s mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, who spent 1979 mocking American hostages and condemning them as spies. A federal judge has temporarily barred their deportation, but the family remains locked in a concrete cell, trapped in a detention crisis that refuses to acknowledge their right to liberty — hostages to an administrative machinery that has declared lineage a deportable offense.
We have spent decades building an immigration system that purports to be about enforcement, security, and the preservation of order. But when a Secretary of State decides that he has the authority to reach back nearly fifty years to punish a family for its ancestry, we are no longer talking about security. We are talking about retribution. The deportation machine operates by a simple rule: hold the innocent close to the guilty until the state extracts its satisfaction. Rubio is now extending that logic beyond the living, reaching backward to harvest political debt from the descendants of those who humiliated the American empire. This is not the rule of law; it is the administrative card revocation used as a weaponized proxy, a mechanism that bypasses traditional procedural protections and converts historical grievance into currency, with the Hashemi family as the payment.
The prophet Ezekiel named this exact operation centuries before it became a bureaucratic procedure: the child shall not bear the iniquity of the parent, for each soul stands before justice on its own account. Punishing a family for an ancestor’s words is a violation of that ancient law, yet here in Texas the Hashemis are living Ezekiel’s prohibition in reverse, languishing in detention because the state has decided that collective grievance outweighs individual culpability. The Torah’s commandment to love the stranger — repeated more than thirty times, the most insistent instruction in the entire Hebrew Bible — exists precisely to ensure that no state ever exacts collective punishment on those who come to it seeking shelter. We who built a country on the principle that our laws look to conduct, not to bloodlines, have a responsibility to name when the government abandons that standard in favor of a vengeance that belongs to the last century.
There is a long, ugly lineage in this country of holding children responsible for the transgressions of their parents, and we recognize it most clearly when it wears a familiar face — but it wears the same face here. The administration holds this family not because they broke any law, but because the machinery of interior enforcement has taught itself to view people as categories of risk rather than as human beings, as historical symbols rather than as neighbors. Jesus names the final judgment in Matthew 25 by what was done to the stranger — not by the foreign-policy record of their grandparents or the rhetorical sins of their parents, but by whether they were welcomed, fed, visited in prison. The question hanging over the Texas detention center is not complicated; it is only impossible to answer without flinching.
Pope Francis insists in Fratelli Tutti that the limits and borders of individual states cannot stand in the way of the intrinsic dignity of every person, and the Hashemi family — ten years in Los Angeles, a decade of ordinary life — now waits behind those borders while the state decides whether history is more important than humanity. To the officials operating this machine: look at the family in that detention unit. They are people. They are not proxies for a regime half a world away, and they are not bargaining chips for a grievance that belongs to the age of their parents. Your authority is tasked with the administration of law, not the settling of historical scores. If you have lost the ability to distinguish between the two, you have lost the integrity of the office you hold.
The door of return is always open, even for those who have spent their careers building walls. Rubio can revoke a card and order a transfer, but he cannot revoke the human dignity of the Hashemi family, and the state loses its moral legitimacy every time it holds a child hostage for a speech made forty-seven years ago. You can stop this. You can choose, even now, to acknowledge the humanity of the family you are so determined to cast out. We demand their immediate release — not as a favor, but as the bare minimum required of a nation that claims the stranger will find ground here, and that the law will not punish the children for the sins of their parents.