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BREAKING: Hamideh Soleimani Afshar is the niece of Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force who was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. She held a United States green card. She lived in Tujunga, California, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. She maintained an Instagram account from American soil on which, according to the State Department, she promoted Iranian regime propaganda, celebrated attacks against American soldiers and military facilities in the Middle East, praised the new Supreme Leader, denounced the United States as the “Great Satan,” and voiced what the Department described as “unflinching support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the organisation the United States designates as a foreign terrorist organisation. She did this while living under the legal protection of the country she was calling the Great Satan.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated her lawful permanent resident status and that of her daughter this week under his authority to act on foreign policy and national security grounds. Federal agents arrested both on April 3. They are now in ICE custody pending removal from the United States. Her husband has been barred from entry. This follows the earlier revocation of status for Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of former Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani, under the same authority and the same rationale.
The timing is not incidental. The arrests came on the same day an F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran, a weapons systems officer went missing, and the President posted a 48-hour countdown to strikes on Iranian infrastructure. The administration is fighting a war against the IRGC while simultaneously removing IRGC supporters from American soil. The two operations, one kinetic and one legal, are running in parallel and reinforcing the same message: no component of the Iranian regime’s support network is beyond reach, whether it operates from a missile silo in Khuzestan or an Instagram account in Los Angeles.
Rubio’s statement was direct. “The Trump Administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes.” The action is unusual in its mechanism. Green card revocations on foreign policy grounds are rare and typically reserved for cases where the Secretary of State makes a personal determination that an individual’s presence is contrary to American interests. Rubio made that determination. The speed of execution, from petition to arrest in under ten weeks, signals that the administration views this category of enforcement as a wartime priority, not a bureaucratic process.
The broader signal extends beyond one family. Thousands of Iranian-linked green card and visa holders live in the United States. The vast majority are ordinary people with no regime ties. But the Afshar case establishes a precedent: if you hold American residency and publicly celebrate violence against American service members by a designated terrorist organisation, the Secretary of State can end your status without a criminal conviction, on his own authority, and have you in custody within hours.
The niece of the man whose killing nearly started a war in 2020 has been removed from the country that killed him, while the war his organisation is now fighting enters its most dangerous week. The legal architecture that allowed her to live in Los Angeles while praising the IRGC has been dismantled by the administration bombing the IRGC’s missile sites from carriers in the Arabian Sea. There is no safe harbour.
