The Trump administration says the pair were living in Los Angeles after gaining U.S. legal status that has now been revoked.
LOS ANGELES, CA — Federal immigration agents detained two Iranian women in Los Angeles on Friday after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked their green cards, saying they had supported Iran’s government while living in the United States and were now subject to removal.
The case quickly became part of a wider Trump administration crackdown on Iranian nationals with ties to the current or former government in Tehran. U.S. officials identified the women as Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter and said they were in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody pending deportation. The move also drew immediate pushback from Iran, where media outlets quoted two daughters of the late Gen. Qassem Soleimani as denying the women were related to him at all. That dispute left one of the central claims in the case contested even as the detentions moved ahead.
The arrests were announced publicly Saturday, a day after agents took the two women into custody in Los Angeles. Rubio said he had terminated their lawful permanent resident status this week. In public statements, the State Department described Afshar as the niece of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed in a U.S. strike near Baghdad in January 2020, and described her daughter as his grandniece. The department said the pair had been living in Los Angeles and accused Afshar of publicly supporting Iran’s leadership, promoting official propaganda and celebrating attacks on Americans. Rubio said the administration would not allow the United States to become “a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes,” and said Afshar’s husband had also been barred from entering the country. Officials did not announce criminal charges against either woman, and they did not say exactly where in Los Angeles the arrests took place.
U.S. statements centered on immigration status, not a criminal prosecution. The State Department said Afshar and her daughter were now in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. Officials said their green cards had been terminated, but they released few details about the process used to revoke them or the timetable for any hearing before an immigration judge. The government also did not identify the daughter by name in its initial statement, though other reports named her as Sarinasadat Hosseiny. U.S. officials said Afshar had lived a “lavish lifestyle” in Los Angeles and pointed to deleted social media posts as evidence that she backed the Iranian regime and used anti-American rhetoric. The department did not release a packet of records with the public announcement, and it did not say Saturday whether lawyers for the women had commented. By the end of the day, the Iranian mission to the United Nations had not publicly responded in detail to the detentions.
The case landed in a charged political moment. The Trump administration has been taking a harder line on Iranians linked to Tehran, and officials said the two Los Angeles detentions were part of a broader set of recent visa and residency actions. The administration has also moved against Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, identified by U.S. officials as the daughter of the late Iranian political figure Ali Larijani, and her husband. Officials said those two were no longer in the United States and had also been barred from entry. In December, the State Department separately revoked or declined to renew visas for several Iranian diplomats and staff members at Iran’s mission to the United Nations. Against that backdrop, the Los Angeles case carried weight beyond a single deportation matter: it signaled that family or political ties to Tehran, combined with public support for the Iranian government, could now trigger swift immigration consequences under the administration’s policy. At the same time, civil liberties questions hovered in the background because the government’s own public case leaned heavily on speech and online expression.
Another major point remained unresolved by Saturday night: whether the women were in fact members of Soleimani’s family. Reuters reported that Iranian state media cited a foreign ministry official saying the person arrested in the United States had no family ties to Soleimani. Iranian media also quoted two of Soleimani’s daughters, Zeinab Soleimani and Narjes Soleimani, rejecting the U.S. account. Zeinab said the people detained in the United States had “no connection whatsoever” to the late commander’s family. Narjes, who serves on Tehran’s city council, was quoted as saying no member of the family or any relative had lived in the United States. Those denials did not stop the deportation process from moving forward, but they complicated a case that the U.S. government had framed in personal and symbolic terms because of Soleimani’s role in Iran’s military and his killing during Trump’s first term. If the women are not relatives, the central public narrative offered by U.S. officials would shift from one about a famous bloodline to one about alleged ideological support for Tehran by green card holders living in Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, the arrests added an international edge to a routine immigration enforcement scene. The public record so far contains few street-level details from the operation itself, but the political language around it was unusually blunt. Rubio cast the case as a warning that immigration benefits can be withdrawn from foreign nationals accused of backing hostile governments. U.S. officials used vivid language about the women’s life in Southern California, contrasting their years in Los Angeles with the views the government said Afshar had expressed online. The administration’s statements were written for a broad public audience, not just an immigration court file, and they made the case part of a larger message about national security and loyalty during a period of deep tension between Washington and Tehran. For now, the immediate facts are these: two women were detained Friday in Los Angeles, their legal status was revoked, no criminal charges were announced, one husband was barred from entering the country, and a public dispute over the women’s family ties to Qassem Soleimani remains unsettled.
The case stood Sunday at the removal stage, with the women in ICE custody and no public hearing date announced. The next milestone is likely an immigration court proceeding or a further federal statement clarifying the legal basis for the revocations and whether the government will address Iran’s denial of the claimed family relationship.
Author note: Last updated April 5, 2026.