Donna Kashanian, also known as Mandonna, had been living in the U.S. for 47 years. She got married to an American citizen and together they raised a daughter. Tragically, while tending to her garden in New Orleans, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers approached her, handcuffed her, and took her away, as reported by her family.
In 1978, Kashanian entered the country on a student visa and later sought asylum due to concerns about potential repercussions for her father’s support of the U.S.-backed shah. Although her asylum request was denied, she was permitted to stay in the U.S. with her family under the condition that she checked in regularly with immigration authorities. Her husband and daughter recalled instances like her post-Hurricane Katrina check-in from South Carolina. Currently, Kashanian is held at an immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, while her loved ones strive to gather more information about her situation.
Recently, there have been reports of other Iranian individuals facing arrests by immigration officials after living in the U.S. for many years. While the exact number of individuals taken into custody remains undisclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, the anxiety over potential further detentions has risen following U.S. military actions involving Iran.
“Some 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’re linked to any threat and then arrest them and deport them, which is very concerning,” said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group.
Homeland Security did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on Kashanian’s 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. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said, without elaborating, that it arrested seven Iranians at a Los Angeles-area address that “has been repeatedly used to harbor illegal entrants linked to terrorism.”
The department “has been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country, came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs or otherwise,” spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said of the 11 arrests. She didn’t offer any evidence of terrorist or extremist ties. Her comment on parole programs referred to President Joe Biden’s expanded legal pathways to entry, which his successor, Donald Trump, shut down.
Russell Milne, Kashanian’s husband, said his wife is not a threat. Her appeal for asylum was complicated because of “events in her early life,” he explained. A court found an earlier marriage of hers to be fraudulent.
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.
The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her.
“She’s meeting her obligations,” Milne said. “She’s retirement age. She’s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?”
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.
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’t take their people back. During Trump’s second term, countries including El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama have taken back noncitizens from the U.S.
The administration has asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for several deportations to South Sudan, a war-ravaged country with which it has no ties, after the justices allowed deportations to countries other than those noncitizens came from.
The U.S. Border Patrol arrested Iranians 1,700 times at the Mexican border from October 2021 through November 2024, according to the most recent public data available. The Homeland Security Department reported that about 600 Iranians overstayed visas as business or exchange visitors, tourists and students in the 12-month period through September 2023, the most recent data reports.
Iran was one of 12 countries subject to a U.S. travel ban that took effect this month. Some fear ICE’s growing deportation arrests will be another blow.
In Oregon, an Iranian man was detained by immigration agents this past week while driving to the gym. He was picked up roughly two weeks before he was scheduled for a check-in at ICE offices in Portland, according to court documents filed by his attorney, Michael Purcell.
The man, identified in court filings as S.F., has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, and his wife and two children are U.S. citizens.
S.F. applied for asylum in the U.S. in the early 2000s, but his application was denied in 2002. His appeal failed but the government did not deport him and he continued to live in the country for decades, according to court documents.
Due to “changed conditions” in Iran, S.F. would face “a vastly increased danger of persecution” if he were to be deported, Purcell wrote in his petition. “These circumstances relate to the recent bombing by the United States of Iranian nuclear facilities, thus creating a de facto state of war between the United States and Iran.”
S.F.’s long residency in the U.S., his conversion to Christianity and the fact that his wife and children are U.S. citizens “sharply increase the possibility of his imprisonment in Iran, or torture or execution,” he said.
Similarly, Kashanian’s daughter said she is worried what will happen to her mother.
“She tried to do everything right,” Kaitlynn Milne said.
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