Marco Rubio is jailing an Iranian family for a crime committed by their aunt in 1979.
Eissa Hashemi taught at a private university; his wife, Maryam Tahmasebi, taught psychology and statistics at a community college; their son sat in American classrooms. For more than a decade they built a life here, green cards in hand from the government lottery, until the Secretary of State reached back forty-seven years to an embassy seizure in Tehran and decided that bloodline is the same as conduct. As prior reporting has documented, the law Rubio is using is a foreign-policy hook—a provision dragged out of the shadows that lets the Secretary of State remove someone based on a “reasonable belief” of “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It is a blunt instrument wielded to snare people who have no money, no power, and no ties to the government of Iran other than a shared last name with Masoumeh Ebtekar, the “Sister Mary” who was the spokesperson for the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979. You do this in the dark, and you call it national security.
Mr. Secretary, you are punishing three people for the acts of another. The prophet Ezekiel spoke directly to this: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. That is not a suggestion; it is a command. Yet you have made this son, this daughter-in-law, this grandchild bear the weight of a hostage crisis they had no part in. This is what the tradition calls collective punishment. It is what the law calls guilt by association. It is what plain English calls cruel.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in their pastoral letter Strangers No Longer, wrote that the human dignity of migrants “should be respected, regardless of their legal status.” That dignity is not conditional on a genealogical screening. The Catholic moral tradition—your own tradition, Mr. Secretary—insists that each person is accountable for their own acts. Yet the State Department’s spokesperson says that allowing people with close ties to senior Iranian officials “could be exploited for propaganda.” The family has no money, no power, no political role. The only propaganda being exploited is the administration’s own, using this family as a prop to display toughness toward Iran, indifferent to the human beings being crushed in the machine.
We Americans have done this before. The Japanese internment camps were built on the same logic: that a person’s ancestry makes them a threat, that the individual can be disappeared for the sins of a nation of origin. One of the family’s friends described the arrests as “Japanese internment camps and World War II–level thinking.” That language is not hyperbole. The machinery is different—immigration detention instead of military camps—but the moral architecture is identical. Those of us who did not speak out then were complicit in that evil. Those of us who say nothing now will be judged by the same measure. We who read the news of 1979 and let the image of the blindfolded hostage become the only image of Iran we allow ourselves to harbor have built the silence this policy needs. We accepted the fiction that a nation is a monolith, that every face from that geography carries the guilt of its dictators, and we let that fiction harden into the machinery of the state. The climate Rubio is exploiting is one our own communities helped to build.
The State Department first deployed this rarely used foreign-policy provision against the relatives of Gen. Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, revoking green cards for his niece and grand-niece. Now Rubio is stretching the same mechanism to encompass decades-old academic acquaintances and extended kin. The provision allows the secretary of state to seek removal of anyone whose presence might have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The government is now stretching that provision to cover people whose only adverse consequence is that they exist and share blood with someone who once opposed the United States. If this standard holds, every immigrant who has a family member the administration dislikes can be jailed and expelled. Legal petitions challenge a policy that treats an entire lineage as a threat to the republic.
The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The Torah commands this more than thirty times, anchored in the memory of Egypt. The command is not conditional on the stranger’s ancestry or the politics of their relatives. It binds the conscience of the community to the person standing before it. When you strip a green card because of a relative’s speech, you are not protecting the border; you are violating the ancient prohibition against the punishment of the son for the father. The law of the ger requires you to judge the person at your gate by what that person has done. Rubio’s order judges them by who they are related to.
Pope Francis teaches that the migrant is a person, not a category, and that the universal destination of goods includes the right to belong to a community. In the final judgment of Matthew 25, the nations are separated not by their visa status or their clearance levels, but by whether they welcomed the stranger. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The family of Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi are the strangers at the gate, and the gate is being locked by a man who has never taught a community college class, never graded papers in a second language, never felt the terror of a detention center in Texas. The state calls this a “foreign-policy consequence.” Jesus calls it a failure to see the face of Christ in the least of these.
Romero preached that there is a “social sin” and a “structural sin” when the political order privileges the powerful and crushes the weak. This detention is a structural sin. It uses the full weight of the federal apparatus to break a family because their aunt once spoke for a revolutionary government. A lawyer for the family says there are no specific allegations against the man, the woman, or the child. There are only the allegations against the blood. The government’s claimed “foreign-policy authority” mirrors the World War II rationale of “military necessity,” and in both cases, legal residents with no proof of disloyalty are targeted. A federal judge has already recognized the legal overreach by temporarily barring deportation, but the family remains in custody while the challenge works through the courts.
Release them, Mr. Secretary, before the sin of what you are doing becomes the sin of what you permitted to be done in your name. Romero ordered soldiers to let their conscience prevail over the order to kill; here the order is to punish the innocent, and the conscience of the state must prevail over the order. Let the family go. Return the green cards. Let the teacher teach and the mother mother, and let the conscience of the country begin the long work of unlearning the lie that bloodline is guilt. The sun rises over the detention facilities in Texas as it rose over the camps of Manzanar. The wire is different; the fear is the same. The door of return is open, but it won’t stay open forever. See Christ in them, and let them go home.