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As war on Iran rages again, and tired rhetoric of “Iranian sleeper cells” resurfaces, Iranian American communities are bracing for another round of backlash at home in the U.S. through immigration enforcement.

Last year, ICE agents arrested Mandonna Kashanian while she was picking figs in front of her New Orleans home. She was 64 years old with no criminal record, had arrived in the United States in 1978 and lived in New Orleans for 47 years — volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and raising a family of U.S. citizens. She was then detained by ICE without due process and released only after Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise personally intervened. Her community showed up. She was lucky. Most Iranian Americans have not been so lucky.

Her arrest followed the first round of illegal, unprovoked Israeli airstrikes on Iran last June. In just one week after that June war, federal immigration authorities took 183 Iranians into custody — up from just five the week before, according to data included in a report I contributed to last October in Prism. The pattern is unmistakable: The more war we have with Iran, the more we dehumanize and abuse Iranians here — and in the times that U.S. bombs have fallen on Iran, ICE has arrested and abused Iranians en masse in the United States. As of September 2025, 320 documented final orders of removal had been issued to Iranians; 83 cases were heard in California courts and 28 deportees were residents of Los Angeles County alone — the heart of the largest Iranian American community in the country.

That is a two-front squeeze on the community — an authoritarian Iranian government repressing Iranians in their homeland and a U.S. government arresting and deporting them, while carpet bombing their families, hospitals, cultural heritage sites, and elementary schools. This constant state of pain defines what it means to be Iranian in the U.S. right now. And it demands to be said plainly: the targeted, coordinated assault on Iranian American civil rights is an emergency right here in the United States.

How Has Trump Assaulted the Civil Rights of Iranians?

The administration’s legal assault on Iranian Americans predates the illegal, unprovoked February 2026 bombing campaign by nearly a year. In June 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation placing a full travel ban on nationals of 12 countries, including Iran. In December 2025, that ban was expanded under a new proclamation effective January 1, 2026. Under the expanded ban, the State Department paused all immigrant visa processing for 75 countries, with Iran among those most severely affected. Over 100,000 visas had been revoked since Trump returned to the presidency — a record for a single year.

Iranian Dies in ICE Custody as Trump Administration Bombs Iran

The more war we have with Iran, the more we dehumanize and abuse Iranians here.

The more war we have with Iran, the more we dehumanize and abuse Iranians here.

In December 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued guidance suspending the adjudication of all immigration benefit requests — green cards, naturalizations, and asylum cases — for nationals of travel ban countries. The practical result is that an Iranian permanent resident who has lived here for decades, raised children, paid taxes, and passed a citizenship exam cannot currently apply to become a U.S. citizen. Avideh Moussavian, the former chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy at USCIS, described the purpose plainly: “The goal is to send a message of invoking fear, to make people afraid and to deter people. So, you have people who think they should be going through the process, they should be fine, and then they are being pulled out of the line for their oath ceremonies. What message does that send to other people?”

Then, in February 2026, with no press conference or public announcement, the administration eliminated the refugee pathway for Iranian religious minorities entirely........

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