On April 4, the State Department announced that Secretary Marco Rubio had terminated the lawful permanent resident (“LPR” or “green card”) status of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, and that the duo had been taken into DHS custody. Afshar is the niece of Qasem Soleimani, late leader of Iran’s notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was killed in a January 2020 U.S. airstrike under Trump I. It is a wild story of how asylum has been abused for years in the United States.
A Clunky and Convoluted Section of the INA
LPRs can only be taken into ICE custody and removed if they have done something that would render them removable on one or more of the grounds of deportation in section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
In these cases, it appears Rubio used his authority under section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the INA, which renders deportable any alien “whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
If that clunky legislative language sounds familiar, it’s probably because this was the ground DHS first used to detain (and attempt to deport) Columbia University “activist” Mahmoud Khalil, another green card holder who was taken into custody in March 2025, and whose case remains tied up in the courts.
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