US state department revokes green cards of three Iranian nationals it links to regime

United States federal agents arrested three Iranian nationals – including the son of a revolutionary at the center of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis – after the US state department terminated their green cards, the department announced on Saturday.State department officials revoked the green card status of Seyed Eissa Hashemi, whose mother was an Iranian revolutionary who served as the spokesperson for Iran’s regime during the hostage crisis that defined the late Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The state department also revoked the green card – or legal permanent resident – statuses of Hashemi’s wife and son.In a statement, the state department referred to Hashemi’s mother as “Screaming Mary”, and said she was “notorious for her role as the leading propagandist for the violent Islamists who perpetrated the Iran hostage crisis”.Hashemi entered the US in 2014 on a visa and was eventually granted lawful permanent resident status in 2016 through the diversity immigrant visa program, according to the state department. The state department noted that the Trump administration has since ended the diversity visa program.“The Trump administration will never allow America to become a home for foreign nationals tied to anti-American terrorist regimes,” the state department said in a statement.The arrests follow a string of similar green card terminations carried out against those the state department deems has ties to the current or former government of Iran, against him the US and Israel have been waging war since late February.Federal agents arrested Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, the niece of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian military general who was assassinated by the US in 2020, along with her daughter earlier in April. US officials accused Soleimani Afshar of being an outspoken supporter of Iran and celebrating military strikes conducted against US personnel while leading a “lavish” lifestyle in Los Angeles.The state department also recently revoked the green card status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of former Iranian national security council secretary Ali Larijani, and her husband.Washington DC and Tehran reached a two-week ceasefire agreement on Tuesday.Though Iran said it would reopen the strait of Hormuz, a passageway where a fifth of the world’s oil supply typically passes through, Donald Trump accused the Iranian government of doing a “very poor job” of allowing oil through the strait. “That is not the agreement we have!” the president wrote on Thursday on social media.JD Vance, the US vice-president, has been dispatched to Islamabad to broker peace talks over the weekend, though Iranian leadership said they would not participate until Israel agrees to stop bombing Lebanon. On Friday, officials from Israel and Lebanon agreed to meet in Washington DC on Tuesday to discuss their own ceasefire.