Latest news with #Ghasemzadeh
New York Times
23-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
This Christian Convert Fled Iran, and Ran Into Trump's Deportation Policy.
She first entered a church on a visit to Turkey. She remembers feeling a sense of calm so overpowering that she purchased a small Bible. She wrapped it in her clothes and smuggled it back to her hometown, Isfahan, in central Iran. Artemis Ghasemzadeh's conversion from Islam to Christianity evolved over a few years starting in 2019, through an Iranian network of underground churches and secret online classes. Three years ago, she was baptized and, in her words, 'reborn.' Converting was colossally risky. While Christians born into the faith are free to practice, Iran's Shariah laws state that abandoning Islam for another religion is considered blasphemy, punishable by death. Some members of her Bible-study group were arrested. So in December, Ms. Ghasemzadeh set out for the United States. 'I wanted to live freely, to live without fear, to live without someone wanting to kill me,' Ms. Ghasemzadeh, 27, said in a series of phone interviews. Her journey has landed her in a migrant detention camp on the outskirts of the Darién jungle in Panama. She and nine other Iranian Christian converts, three of them children, are among dozens detained at the Saint Vincente camp. Their fate remains uncertain. People fleeing violent religious persecution are normally eligible for asylum. But they have been caught in the Trump administration's deportation push as the president tries to fulfill a campaign pledge to close the southern border. 'We don't deserve this. We are in a place where we feel helpless' Ms. Ghasemzadeh said. 'I am waiting for our voices to be heard, for someone to help us.' Panama, which is separately under pressure from the Trump administration over control of the Panama Canal, has become a landing place for migrants who otherwise would have languished in detention in the United States — or potentially been released. Panamanian officials have said that U.N. agencies are helping the migrants return to their countries or seek asylum in other nations, including Panama. A Dangerous Conversion Ms. Ghasemzadeh grew up in an upper-middle class family in Isfahan. Her businessman father was religiously conservative and strict with her and her three siblings. She did not tell him about her conversion. Christianity appealed to her, she said, because its message sounded more peaceful and its rules less stringent than the version of Islam she had experienced in Iran. The church applied extreme precautions to its underground gatherings, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said. Parishioners received one-time passwords to log into virtual meetings. In-person sermons and classes were hosted at different locations. Ms. Ghasemzadeh said she cherished her Christian community. Her older brother, Shahin, 32, also converted. In 2022, a women-led uprising swept across Iran, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in custody of the morality police on allegations of violating the hijab rule. Ms. Ghasemzadeh said she protested nearly every day, chanting 'Women, Life, Freedom.' Like many women in Iran who have stopped wearing the hijab in an act of defiance, she let her long, dark hair flow in public. The government sent her text messages, summoning her before a judge, she said. She did not show up. If convicted of violating the hijab law, women can be fined. Journey to America In late December, Ms. Ghasemzadeh and her brother Shahin departed Iran, bound for the United States. She knew about Mr. Trump's promise to crack down on migrants, but said she believed that he was only targeting criminals. They went to Abu Dhabi, then South Korea and arrived in Mexico City. There, they asked around at a hotel and found a smuggler. He charged them each $3,000 and ferried them to Tijuana. There, near the border wall in the middle of the night, the smuggler pointed to a ladder. 'Go,' she remembers the smuggler saying. 'Climb the wall and go, quick.' When her feet touched American soil, she burst into tears. 'It's over,' she said she told her brother. 'We are finally here.' The euphoria was short-lived. Minutes later, border agents surrounded them. They were transported to a detention facility and separated. She has not seen nor spoken to her brother since, she said. Her mother told her that he was taken to a facility in Texas, where he remains. Ms. Ghasemzadeh said she repeatedly told the authorities that she was a Christian convert from Iran seeking asylum. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said that 'not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.' Ms. Ghasemzadeh said that she was never interviewed about her asylum claim. 'They kept saying now is not the time, tomorrow morning,' she said. She was shackled and put on a military plane to Panama on Feb. 12. The plane's engine roared so loudly that her ears rang. The turbulence made her nauseous. It was her 27th birthday. Deported Ms. Ghasemzadeh met nine other Iranians on the plane, all Christian converts, who remarkably shared a similar story. The group has since banded together. For about a week, they were held inside a hotel under the watch of armed guards. The New York Times has been in daily contact with her since she arrived in Panama. Ms. Ghasemzadeh, who like many Iranians of her generation is digitally savvy, made a video describing their plight and shared it with Persian news channels outside Iran. It went viral. After she and others refused to sign documents that would pave the way for their repatriation, they were put on buses and sent to the jungle camp. Ali Herschi, an Iranian-American human rights lawyer in Washington, represents the Iranians pro bono. Mr. Herschi said his priority was to stop Panama from deporting them to Iran. Then, he said, 'appealing with American authorities to reverse course and allow the group re-entry to the U.S. on humanitarian grounds.' The jungle camp, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said, looks like a large fenced cage. The sleeping area was muggy and the migrants did not have blankets. They were given one bottle of water and told to refill it from the bathroom faucet, she said. Her arm was swollen and red from mosquito bites and one of the children in their group, Sam, 11, had fallen and injured his ankle. Medical staff told the Iranian parents the camp did not have an X-ray machine to determine if bones were broken, she said. Panama has said the migrants have everything they need. Every night Ms. Ghasemzadeh scribbles Christian quotes in a small notebook. On one page, she wrote to Jesus in Persian: 'I am certain you can hear my voice from up there. So please help.' Next to it she drew a tiny red heart.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Iranian Christians feared death in Iran. Then the US deported them to Panama.
The young woman in the video sounds desperate. Sitting on a bed in a hotel room surrounded by eight other people, including several children, she explains to the camera that they're all Iranian Christians who journeyed to the U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana to seek asylum – then were shackled and flown six hours in a military plane to Panama. 'All of our cases are legitimate,' she says, her eyes burrowing with worry. 'I'm a protester in Iran with a record. I can't go back.' The woman – later identified as 27-year-old Artemis Ghasemzadeh – was part of a group of Iranian Christians, as well as migrants from Afghanistan, Nepal, China and other countries, who were recently flown from the U.S. to Panama and Costa Rica. The flights are part of President Donald Trump and his administration's strategy of outsourcing some of its most challenging deportations and removing as many people as possible who are in the U.S. without permission. On Thursday, the administration took another step designating eight gangs from Latin America as "foreign terrorist organizations," increasing the reach of U.S. law enforcement as they race to deport record number of migrants and deliver on one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. But these deportation flights trample migrant's rights and could return some asylum-seekers to dangerous situations, immigrant advocates and attorneys say. 'This is unprecedented,' Hillary Walsh, an immigration attorney in Phoenix whose office has been in touch with the Iranians in Panama, said of the new flights. 'It's not making asylum law hard – it's eliminating asylum law.' Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the deportations, did not respond to a request for comment. Ghasemzadeh and the other Iranians traveled through several countries, including Mexico, to reach the U.S.-Mexico border at Tijuana, Walsh said. After they crossed the border, U.S. officials took their passports and other documents and gave them immigration detention wristbands. They were never given 'credible fear' interviews, Walsh said, often the first step to determining whether migrants could apply for asylum. The migrants were told detention centers there were full and they were transporting them to Texas, Walsh said. Instead, they were shackled, boarded onto a C-17 military cargo plane and flown to Panama. 'They tied our hands and feet,' Ghasemzadeh says in the video, which, as of Wednesday, had been shared more than 160,000 times. 'Women and children were getting sick, fainting … You could hear cries and horrifying noises from the plane.' As of 2019, there were about 385,000 Iranian immigrants living in the United States, or less than 1 percent of the nearly 45 million immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That year, there were approximately 7,000 unauthorized Iranian immigrants, or less than 0.1% of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. Iranian Christians present a particularly compelling asylum case, according to immigrant advocates, since the Iranian government prohibits converting from Islam to any religion. Sharia, or Islamic religious law, as interpreted by the government considers conversion from Islam apostasy, a crime punishable by death, according to the U.S. State Department. The vast majority of Iranians who arrive in the U.S. do so through a third country, often Turkey, and with the proper visas, said Peyman Malaz, chief operating officer of the PARS Equality Center, an L.A.-based advocacy group that helps mostly Persian-speaking migrants. Over the past four or five months, however, his center has seen an uptick in Iranians arriving at the border who complain that their wait times in third countries are stretching past five or six years, he said. Those who arrive at the border are often the most persecuted and desperate, such as Iranian Christians, he said. Malaz said he was dismayed to hear of the Iranian Christians who were flown to Panama without any process for asylum. 'I was shocked,' he said. 'The United States has always been a beacon of hope for refugees. These people are running away from an autocratic government.' The Iranian Christians were part of a flight of 119 people who arrived in Panama aboard the C-17 on February 12, the first of three flights to arrive in the country the past week, said Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights using publicly available flight records for the advocacy group Witness at the Border. Another flight filled with migrants later landed in Costa Rica. More: 'Woman, life, liberty': Iranians on why they'll risk beatings and death for change The last time the U.S. government transported migrants to a third country that was not their country of origin was when immigration officials flew asylum-seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and other countries to southern Mexico under the Biden administration, Cartwright said. Those flights ended in late 2022. The use of military cargo flights is baffling, he said, since U.S. officials could transport migrants on commercial charter flights for a fraction of the cost. Also, some of the nationalities on the flights, such as Nepal and India, the U.S. could deport directly to their countries of origin rather than pay to take them through a third country, Cartwright said. More: OnPolitics: Why Iranians are fighting for their freedom 'From a financial sense, it makes no sense at all. Zero,' he said. Cartwright said he and other immigrant advocates suspect Trump is using an executive order he signed last month to invoke a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the president the authority to 'suspend the entry' of certain noncitizens, whose entry would be 'detrimental to the interests of the United States.' Earlier this month, immigrant rights groups sued the Trump administration in federal court, claiming the executive order unlawfully shut down asylum at the border. 'This is an unprecedented power grab that will put countless lives in danger,' Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement accompanying the filing. 'No president has the authority to unilaterally override the protections Congress has afforded those fleeing danger.' On Tuesday, Ghasemzadeh and the other Iranians were transferred from their hotel in Panama City to a remote migrant center at the edge of the jungle, according to Walsh's office. It's unclear what rights and procedures are being afforded to them. Attorneys are trying to help her and others, Walsh said. But at such a distance and with communication a challenge, it's becoming increasingly difficult, Walsh said. Her top concern: That Ghasemzadeh and the others could be returned to Iran. 'They'll definitely be harmed when they go back,' Walsh said. 'There's no question in my mind.' Follow Rick Jervis on X: @MrRJervis. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: They feared death in Iran. The US banished them to Panama.
USA Today
20-02-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Iranian Christians feared death in Iran. Then the US deported them to Panama.
Iranian Christians feared death in Iran. Then the US deported them to Panama. Show Caption Hide Caption Critics question the legality of undocumented migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay For the first time around ten undocumented migrants arrived at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base. The U.S. government has begun flying migrants to Panama and Costa Rica as part of a strategy to increase deportations. Immigrant advocates say the flights violate migrants' rights and could put asylum-seekers in danger. The young woman in the video sounds desperate. Sitting on a bed in a hotel room surrounded by eight other people, including several children, she explains to the camera that they're all Iranian Christians who journeyed to the U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana to seek asylum – then were shackled and flown six hours in a military plane to Panama. 'All of our cases are legitimate,' she says, her eyes burrowing with worry. 'I'm a protester in Iran with a record. I can't go back.' The woman – later identified as 27-year-old Artemis Ghasemzadeh – was part of a group of Iranian Christians, as well as migrants from Afghanistan, Nepal, China and other countries, who were recently flown from the U.S. to Panama and Costa Rica. The flights are part of President Donald Trump and his administration's strategy of outsourcing some of its most challenging deportations and removing as many people as possible who are in the U.S. without permission. On Thursday, the administration took another step designating eight gangs from Latin America as "foreign terrorist organizations," increasing the reach of U.S. law enforcement as they race to deport record number of migrants and deliver on one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. But these deportation flights trample migrant's rights and could return some asylum-seekers to dangerous situations, immigrant advocates and attorneys say. 'This is unprecedented,' Hillary Walsh, an immigration attorney in Phoenix whose office has been in touch with the Iranians in Panama, said of the new flights. 'It's not making asylum law hard – it's eliminating asylum law.' Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the deportations, did not respond to a request for comment. 'Cries and horrifying noises' Ghasemzadeh and the other Iranians traveled through several countries, including Mexico, to reach the U.S.-Mexico border at Tijuana, Walsh said. After they crossed the border, U.S. officials took their passports and other documents and gave them immigration detention wristbands. They were never given 'credible fear' interviews, Walsh said, often the first step to determining whether migrants could apply for asylum. The migrants were told detention centers there were full and they were transporting them to Texas, Walsh said. Instead, they were shackled, boarded onto a C-17 military cargo plane and flown to Panama. 'They tied our hands and feet,' Ghasemzadeh says in the video, which, as of Wednesday, had been shared more than 160,000 times. 'Women and children were getting sick, fainting … You could hear cries and horrifying noises from the plane.' As of 2019, there were about 385,000 Iranian immigrants living in the United States, or less than 1 percent of the nearly 45 million immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That year, there were approximately 7,000 unauthorized Iranian immigrants, or less than 0.1% of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. Iranian Christians present a particularly compelling asylum case, according to immigrant advocates, since the Iranian government prohibits converting from Islam to any religion. Sharia, or Islamic religious law, as interpreted by the government considers conversion from Islam apostasy, a crime punishable by death, according to the U.S. State Department. The vast majority of Iranians who arrive in the U.S. do so through a third country, often Turkey, and with the proper visas, said Peyman Malaz, chief operating officer of the PARS Equality Center, an L.A.-based advocacy group that helps mostly Persian-speaking migrants. More Iranians arrive at the border Over the past four or five months, however, his center has seen an uptick in Iranians arriving at the border who complain that their wait times in third countries are stretching past five or six years, he said. Those who arrive at the border are often the most persecuted and desperate, such as Iranian Christians, he said. Malaz said he was dismayed to hear of the Iranian Christians who were flown to Panama without any process for asylum. 'I was shocked,' he said. 'The United States has always been a beacon of hope for refugees. These people are running away from an autocratic government.' The Iranian Christians were part of a flight of 119 people who arrived in Panama aboard the C-17 on February 12, the first of three flights to arrive in the country the past week, said Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights using publicly available flight records for the advocacy group Witness at the Border. Another flight filled with migrants later landed in Costa Rica. More: 'Woman, life, liberty': Iranians on why they'll risk beatings and death for change The last time the U.S. government transported migrants to a third country that was not their country of origin was when immigration officials flew asylum-seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and other countries to southern Mexico under the Biden administration, Cartwright said. Those flights ended in late 2022. The use of military cargo flights is baffling, he said, since U.S. officials could transport migrants on commercial charter flights for a fraction of the cost. Also, some of the nationalities on the flights, such as Nepal and India, the U.S. could deport directly to their countries of origin rather than pay to take them through a third country, Cartwright said. More: OnPolitics: Why Iranians are fighting for their freedom 'From a financial sense, it makes no sense at all. Zero,' he said. 'They'll definitely be harmed' Cartwright said he and other immigrant advocates suspect Trump is using an executive order he signed last month to invoke a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the president the authority to 'suspend the entry' of certain noncitizens, whose entry would be 'detrimental to the interests of the United States.' Earlier this month, immigrant rights groups sued the Trump administration in federal court, claiming the executive order unlawfully shut down asylum at the border. 'This is an unprecedented power grab that will put countless lives in danger,' Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement accompanying the filing. 'No president has the authority to unilaterally override the protections Congress has afforded those fleeing danger.' On Tuesday, Ghasemzadeh and the other Iranians were transferred from their hotel in Panama City to a remote migrant center at the edge of the jungle, according to Walsh's office. It's unclear what rights and procedures are being afforded to them. Attorneys are trying to help her and others, Walsh said. But at such a distance and with communication a challenge, it's becoming increasingly difficult, Walsh said. Her top concern: That Ghasemzadeh and the others could be returned to Iran. 'They'll definitely be harmed when they go back,' Walsh said. 'There's no question in my mind.' Follow Rick Jervis on X: @MrRJervis.
