Two Iranian women remain in immigration detention, arrested earlier this month on accusations of being the niece and grandniece of Qasem Soleimani, despite no connection to the late Iranian military commander. Drop Site reviewed Iranian birth records, identification papers, a family will, and other personal documents and found no connection whatsoever to him or his extended family. One of the women is now seriously ill in a Texas facility, her chronic blood condition left effectively untreated.
On March 8, right-wing activist Laura Loomer posted on X calling for the deportation of a woman she claimed was Soleimani’s niece. The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maj. Gen. Soleimani was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike, ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Baghdad on January 3, 2020. The day after Loomer’s original post, she tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X, claiming to have reported the woman to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “posting content sympathetic to the Iranian regime and Ayatollah.”
On April 3, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, Sarina Hosseiny, were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at their home outside Los Angeles. Rubio issued a statement headlined, “Secretary Rubio Revokes Green Cards of Foreign Nationals with Ties to Iranian Terror Regime,” identifying them as “the niece and grand niece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani” and describing them as “green card holders living lavishly in the United States.”
The claims made headline news in the U.S., while triggering immediate denials from Soleimani’s family that the two women were relatives of the military commander. The Trump administration has gone largely quiet about the women’s cases since their arrest, as they remain in ICE detention pending deportation to Iran.
As attention has faded, the situation for the women has turned dire at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in San Antonio, particularly for Hamideh, 47, who lives with autoimmune hemolytic anemia, which requires regular treatment and blood transfusions she isn’t getting.
As a student in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hamideh was active in protest movements in Iran, and, she says, even spent a week in prison after getting arrested at one demonstration. Sarina, in a phone interview from the ICE facility where they are being held, said that her mother—not one to hold back her opinions—was most looking forward to having “freedom of speech” when she moved here to the United States. She remains opposed to the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, as well as Trump’s current war. “She’s kind of a passionate person overall, and she thought that she was going to come here and be able to talk freely when she’s been threatened and imprisoned in Iran for speaking about politics, and now she’s again in prison for speaking out about politics,” she told Drop Site.
They were forced to leave Iran under duress after Sarina took part in a dance performance on vacation in Turkey at the age of 12. The dance competition was filmed and later aired by the satellite channel “TV Persia” and her dance went viral. (Two of her performances are still viewable on YouTube.) The channel is illegal in Iran but many residents have access to it. She said she was expelled from her public school, only to enroll in a private school and later to be expelled from that one, too, when the scandal recirculated. Some of her more conservative family members, who had connections to the government, beat and threatened her mother, Hosseiny said, and the situation became increasingly unbearable. At 14, she came to the United States on a student visa and the two of them applied for asylum.
