Latest news with #Torosian
NBC News
10 hours ago
- Health
- NBC News
Iranian woman suffers severe panic attack as ICE agents arrest her husband
LOS ANGELES — Iranian asylum-seekers who fled the Islamic Republic in hopes of resettling in Los Angeles have been arrested recently by immigration officials despite having what lawyers and advocates consider credible-fear cases pending in court. The detentions follow a pattern developing throughout the country of targeting Iranians as tensions continue between the Trump administration and Iran. Many of the asylum-seekers are Christians who fled Iran and its intolerant views toward non-Muslim religions. There are 4 million Iranian exiles worldwide, just under a third of them in the United States, according to Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry statistics from 2021. The sudden detentions have prompted some Iranians to go on hunger strikes in custody and triggered at least one medical emergency during an attempted arrest. On Tuesday, an Iranian woman experienced a severe panic attack after she witnessed her husband's arrest near an area known as 'Tehrangeles' because of its large Iranian population. The woman called her pastor, Ara Torosian, to help intervene, but he could do little as he watched her panic attack escalate into convulsions. The couple's lawyer asked that the woman and her husband remain anonymous for privacy reasons. In a video recorded by Torosian and shared widely on social media, the woman lay on the ground spasming while masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hovered over her. Torosian can be heard pleading with them to administer medical aid. He can also be heard asking whether they know about the situation in Iran and why Christian Iranians fear returning to their native country. According to Torosian, the woman and her husband are members of his church and entered the United States last year under CBP One, the mobile app the Biden administration launched to streamline the asylum-seeking process. President Donald Trump ended the program shortly after he returned to office. The woman was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where ICE agents were met by immigrant advocates and detention protesters. Torosian said that he was not allowed into her hospital room and that immigration officials gruffly brushed away a nurse who tried to intercede on his behalf. UCLA Health said in a statement that it treated a patient under federal custody and later released the person. 'Despite reports on social media, there is no ICE operation happening at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,' the hospital said. A lawyer for the woman and her husband declined to comment. Immigration officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The incident left Torosian shaken, he said Wednesday. He arrived in the United States in 2010 as a Christian refugee and is now a U.S. citizen raising two children in Southern California. But the recent immigration raids and arrests, coupled with anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, remind him more of Iran than he ever imagined possible, he said. 'I was seeing a woman on the ground and masked people who wouldn't show their warrants,' he said. 'I was just shocked. Am I in Iran or am I in L.A.?' Another Iranian Christian family in Torosian's parish were arrested this week during a scheduled check-in with immigration officials. Seyedmajid Seyedali received a text over the weekend telling him to report to the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Monday with his wife and 4-year-daughter, said the family's lawyer, Kaveh Ardalan. Thinking it was a routine visit, the family of three left their dog at home. But when they arrived, they were taken to the basement and arrested despite having an asylum hearing scheduled for September, Ardalan said. They were transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where Seyedali's wife is on a hunger strike, he said. Ardalan said he has at least five Iranian clients who are seeking asylum and were arrested recently. He also has clients from Honduras and Venezuela with pending asylum cases who are now in ICE custody. When he can, Ardalan said, he will ask immigration judges to release eligible families on bond. Torosian said his parish is working to collect enough to pay rent for Seyedali's home should the family get released. "I'm ready for the fight," he said. "I'm standing for my people."
USA Today
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Does 2025 have a song of the summer? The internet has doubts
Does 2025 have a song of the summer? The internet has doubts Show Caption Hide Caption 'Superman,' Mission: Impossible,' 'F1' and summer's must-see films USA TODAY film critic Brian Truitt releases his list of summer's must-see films. The highlights include "Superman" and "Mission: Impossible." For friend groups carpooling to the beach this summer, there may not be a consensus on song choice. While Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" and Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" were among the tunes considered the 2024 song of the summer, there's no such clarity this time around. Music fans have voiced frustration with the lack of clear contenders for the 2025 title, saying no song has gained the same level of momentum as Carpenter's caffeinated earworm or Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-winning diss track "Not Like Us." The public has never unanimously agreed an definitive song of the summer, an unofficial honor that drives debate every year over which artist drops the season's true anthem. Every year, listeners pick a track they feel is emblematic of summer, from The Beach Boy's 1963 "Surfin' U.S.A" or The Police's 1983 "Every Breathe You Take" to Katy Perry's 2010 "California Gurls" featuring Snoop Dogg. This year, the internet has been scratching its head trying to figure out which track will reign supreme. The conundrum only became more apparent when Spotify shared 30 predictions for the 2025 Song of the Summer, a list the streaming giant said considered "cultural expertise, editorial instinct and streaming data." Social media users not only bashed the list, but the state of this year's summer anthems as a whole. Some went as far as saying 2025 might not have any songs of the summer. A song of the summer can't be forced to emerge Wyatt Torosian, a 34-year-old marketing professional from Louisiana, said the issue stems from artists tailoring their releases in the spring, with the hopes of becoming the song of the summer. In Summer 2005, the success of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" was indisputable, with the R&B soul hit playing at any store you walked to, Torosian said. Yet in this era, where musicians heavily utilize social media to promote their work, he argues music simply being made with the intention of going viral. "Everyone's designing music for a TikTok algorithm, and they're not actually making music that people want to listen to," Torosian told USA TODAY. "As artists keep designing songs for algorithms, there's going to be less and less songs that even have the staying capacity to last for an entire summer." Leo Pastel, an independent R&B songwriter based in Cincinnati, said record labels are often the ones vying to have the summer anthem more than the artists themselves. He believes musicians generally haven't been making the "upbeat, bright, happy songs" that epitomize the title yet, and urges labels to just accept that. "Fans will make something, and then like the companies and the labels will pick up on it a year later and try to force it," he said. "There's not really a Song of the Summer this year and I think everyone understands that, but the labels are trying to create it." As a musician himself, Pastel said most artists know better than to force their work to be trendy, adding "anytime you try to force something, it just ends up coming off inauthentic. So it really has to come from an authentic place for it to really connect." A true song of the summer is undeniable When a track is a true song of the summer contender, it's almost irrefutable. Pastel said they're the songs that listeners can't escape from at clubs, or that they can't help but play while riding their bike. Hit summer songs were easier to identify decades ago when radio stations and TV programs had listeners largely consuming the same media at the same time, according to Pastel. Yet as streaming platforms have given listeners more control over what music they listen to, he said it takes lot more for a song to stand out amongst the masses. "It's a lot more difficult for one thing to be ubiquitous and for everyone to be paying attention to it. So I think that it'll be a lot more rare for us to see those major cultural moments like we were used to in years past," Pastel added. Kristi Cook, a pop culture content creator in Los Angeles, noted it's sometimes easier to judge a song of the summer after the season ends altogether. "It takes you back to a smell. It takes you back to a moment in time, like a piece of clothing," said Cook, who has nearly 400,000 followers on her TikTok page Spill Sesh. "Like, it just really takes you back to where you were when you were listening to that song the most. When it was the most played at restaurants or bars." Could the 2025 summer anthem could drop any moment? Many social media users have completely given up on 2025 having a song of the summer, with the exception of devoted fans championing their favorite artists' new releases. Fans of Charli XCX are even pushing for hyper-pop "party 4 u" amid a popularity resurgence, despite the song being released in 2020. Meanwhile, artists like Doja Cat, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, Miley Cyrus and A$AP Rocky are all expected to drop albums in the near future. But summer hasn't officially begun, and Cook is encouraging people not to throw in the towel just yet. "People are looking at it a bit negatively because they don't agree or they don't like these songs that are available right now," she said. "Everyone's waiting for the 'Espresso.' I feel like everyone's just waiting because they hear all these teases or they're hoping their favorites are going to drop a song." With the music world still left in suspense, USA TODAY asked Torosian, Pastel and Cook what they believe should be the 2025 Song of the Summer. Here's what they said.
