Marco Rubio Is Deporting a Family Because of Who Their Relatives Were. The administration has reached across forty years to revoke the green cards of Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son—arresting them in Los Angeles and holding them in Texas—because Masoumeh Ebtekar—known in the 1979 U.S. media as “Sister Mary”—once spoke for a foreign government. There are no specific allegations of wrongdoing against this family. The charge is blood. The sentence is detention pending deportation under a rarely tested foreign-policy provision that the State Department justifies as necessary to avoid “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
This is political purges by proxy, tearing a family from their lives not for what they have done but for whose blood they carry. The Torah forbids the punishment of the children for the sins of the parents. Deuteronomy 24:16 is explicit: “Parents shall not be put to death because of their children, nor children be put to death because of their parents; each shall die for their own sin.” The prophets—Amos, Jeremiah, Ezekiel—repeatedly warned that the sins of the father must not be visited upon the son; to do so is a trampling of the poor, a stripping of the stranger of their rightful garment of protection. Even in the height of war, the law commands: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien.” That law does not contain a footnote excluding those whose aunt was a spokesperson in 1979.
The doctrine of collective guilt is the oldest machinery of authoritarian rule, and you are feeding it through immigration courts. You say they must go because their presence could be exploited for propaganda, as State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott claimed. They are not persons. They are political instruments.
Under the sweeping silence of a foreign-policy removal provision applied only to the politically inconvenient—its text allowing removal if a secretary of state “reasonably believes” a presence would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”—the lived, specific reality of this family has been suffocated. While the government hides behind the broad, rarely adjudicated authority to weaponize a child’s bloodline and send a message to Tehran, Tahmasebi’s own words ring out from detention: she and her husband have “absolutely no ties to money or power,” and their only wish is to stabilize their son’s life. These are the concrete experiences crushed by an abstract statutory clause, a law that treats a mother, father, and child as diplomatic variables rather than human beings.
This is the logic of the Pharisee: the meticulous performance of procedural righteousness to license a fundamental violation of the human person. The administration points to the foreign-policy removal provision—a tool meant for clear and present threats—and stretches its language to reach family ties, claiming as Pigott did that their presence could be “exploited for propaganda.” By this standard, no person is judged by their own actions, but by the convenience their existence offers an adversary. It is a terrifying expansion of state power, a shift from an immigration system that monitors activity to one that monitors genealogy.
We who have claimed the gospel and live in this country have been reminded by the bishops in Strangers No Longer that we are called to see the face of the Lord in the migrant. We are not called to categorize the migrant by their family tree or to curate their associations for the sake of diplomatic messaging. Jesus named the stranger’s face as his own. Matthew 25 does not leave this as an abstract ethic; it makes recognition the criterion for judgment. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” The government’s answer to this recognition is the family’s displacement. You treat a mother, a father, and a child as diplomatic leverage, weaponizing their bloodline to send a message to Tehran. They are reduced to variables in a foreign-relations algorithm. This is a reversal of the welcoming command.
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis called this same kind of thinking the “globalization of indifference,” where governments treat human beings as “unnamed,” responsible yet faceless. Your order is indifference made policy. It requires a mother, a father, and a child to bear the weight of a crisis they did not create simply because the State Department decides their existence is a diplomatic liability.
We who claim the West’s ideals in our Sunday rhetoric have built the architecture that makes this possible. We who read the prophets as comfort rather than indictment have helped train our leaders to treat the innocent as expendable, just as we did when we aligned the “Catholic-Right” fusion with hardline border-security doctrines that taught us to fear the stranger more than to recognize them in the first place. The symmetry is not that our own governments were not built on exclusion; the symmetry is that we accept the same machinery when it serves our comfort.
A judge’s temporary stay is a reminder that a family is a world, and destroying it for political theater is the oldest evil in the book. The door of return, even for those who operate this machine of detention, is not closed. It requires only the recognition that the person in the cell is not an Iranian official, not a propaganda asset, and not a liability to be purged. She is a neighbor. She is a mother. And for as long as we hold her in the name of our national interest, we are not securing the border—we are losing our soul.