Mandonna \u201cDonna\u201d Kashanian lived in the United States for 47 years, married a U.S. citizen and raised their daughter. She was gardening in the yard of her New Orleans home when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers handcuffed and took her away, her family said. <\/p>\n
Kashanian arrived in 1978 on a student visa and applied for asylum, fearing retaliation for her father\u2019s support of the U.S.-backed shah. She lost her bid, but she was allowied to remain with her husband and child if she checked in regularly with immigration officials, her husband and daughter said. She complied, once checking in from South Carolina during Hurricane Katrina. She is now being held at an immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, while her family tries to get information.<\/p>\n
Other Iranians are also getting arrested by immigration authorities after decades in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security won\u2019t say how many people they\u2019ve arrested, but U.S. military strikes on Iran<\/a> have fueled fears that there is more to come.<\/p>\n \u201cSome level of vigilance, of course, makes sense, but what it seems like ICE has done is basically give out an order to round up as many Iranians as you can, whether or not they\u2019re linked to any threat and then arrest them and deport them, which is very concerning,\u201d said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group.<\/p>\n Homeland Security did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on Kashanian\u2019s case but have been touting arrests of Iranians. The department announced the arrests of at least 11 Iranians on immigration violations during the weekend of the U.S. missile strikes.<\/a> U.S. Customs and Border Protection said, without elaborating, that it arrested seven Iranians at a Los Angeles-area address that \u201chas been repeatedly used to harbor illegal entrants linked to terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n The department \u201chas been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country, came in through Biden\u2019s fraudulent parole programs or otherwise,\u201d spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said of the 11 arrests. She didn\u2019t offer any evidence of terrorist or extremist ties. Her comment on parole programs referred to President Joe Biden\u2019s expanded legal pathways to entry, which his successor, Donald Trump, shut down<\/a>.<\/p>\n Russell Milne, Kashanian\u2019s husband, said his wife is not a threat. Her appeal for asylum was complicated because of \u201cevents in her early life,\u201d he explained. A court found an earlier marriage of hers to be fraudulent.<\/p>\n But over four decades, Kashanian, 64, built a life in Louisiana. The couple met when she was bartending as a student in the late 1980s. They married and had a daughter. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, filmed Persian cooking tutorials on YouTube and was a grandmother figure to the children next door.<\/p>\n The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s meeting her obligations,\u201d Milne said. \u201cShe\u2019s retirement age. She\u2019s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?\u201d<\/p>\n While Iranians have been crossing the border illegally for years, especially since 2021, they have faced little risk of being deported to their home countries due to severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. That seems to no longer be the case.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has deported hundreds of people, including Iranians, to countries other than their own in an attempt to circumvent diplomatic hurdles with governments that won\u2019t take their people back. During Trump\u2019s second term, countries including El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama have taken back noncitizens from the U.S.<\/p>\n