The United States has revoked the green cards and detained the family of the Iranian regime propagandist known as “Screaming Mary,” the State Department said on Saturday.
Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi and their son have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement ahead of their deportation, the department said in a statement. Hashemi and his wife both worked as professors at The Chicago School in Los Angeles.
Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, a politician in Iran who first came to the attention of the world as the spokeswoman for the group of students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for over a year.
Ebtekar quickly rose through the political ranks, even serving as a vice president for women and family affairs from 2017 to 2021. She also twice led the country’s Department of Environment.
“Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X. “America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families — and under the Trump Administration, it never will.”
Hashemi and his family came to the U.S. on a visa issued in 2014, according to the State Department. They were granted lawful permanent resident status in 2016 via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, an initiative ended by the Trump administration in December 2025.
President Trump had called for Congress to end the visa program during his first administration in 2017, following the terror attack by Sayfullo Saipov, who entered the U.S. after being approved through the lottery. Saipov was sentenced to life in prison for a truck attack that killed eight people on Halloween in 2017.
Instead of Congress taking action, Mr. Trump himself announced he was ending the diversity lottery in April 2020. That ban was struck down by a federal judge in September 2020. Mr. Trump then reissued the ban on the diversity lottery in December 2025.
The family of Ebtekar is the latest of several families with ties to Iran deported by the Trump administration during recent weeks.
The niece and grand-niece of the deceased Iranian Revolutionary Guard Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was arrested earlier this month after their lawful U.S. permanent resident status was terminated. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were living in Los Angeles at the time they were taken into custody by ICE.
“As identified by both press reporting and her own social media commentary, Soleimani Afshar is an outspoken supporter of the totalitarian, terrorist regime in Iran,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement.
The two remain in ICE custody, the State Department said on Saturday in the same release announcing Ebteker’s family had been arrested.
Qassem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike during the first Trump administration.
The State Department also terminated the legal status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Ali Larijani, and her husband. They are no longer in the United States, officials said.
Vice President JD Vance, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, arrived in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad early Saturday for high-stakes talks over the war in Iran amid a fragile two-week truce. The top item on the agenda will be opening the Strait of Hormuz to allow oil tankers through the key waterway currently blocked by Iran.