Marco Rubio Is Punishing a Teenage Boy for His Grandmother’s Sins
The Bulwark · C · trust 44/100
America gave Rubio’s family a second chance. He gave this family a cage.
Tim Miller September 8 Upgrade to listen 16 minutes 68 11 22 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) MOST PARENTS HAVE STRAIGHTFORWARD IDEAS for what to give their teenaged son for his birthday: a pair of new sneakers, or headphones, or a game to play on his Xbox.
Not Maryam Tahmasebi. She just wants her son to be able to celebrate outside the detention center our country has trapped them in. Her aspirations for him have been reduced to this. She just wants him to be free.
For five months, Tahmasebi and her son have been locked in the Dilley Detention Center, along with other women and children held indefinitely in the Texas facility. Her husband, Eissa, is interned in a separate camp a twenty-minute drive away—not that she ever gets to go there. They can speak only a few minutes every couple of weeks. Eissa, like so many other detainees, has had basic medical treatment denied or delayed.
Their capture was the result of Marco Rubio’s decision to draw on a provision added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1990 that allows the secretary of state to designate a noncitizen as deportable if their presence leads to “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States. In this case, Rubio determined that the family is such a grave threat to our national security that they must be held captive indefinitely without basic due process rights.
You might imagine that such an extreme measure must have been taken because the family participated in drug smuggling or terrorism. Maybe this is a situation where they thought that family was plotting with al Qaeda cells?
Nothing like that. The government has provided no evidence the detainees pose any threat. They are not accused of any crime. No petty thefts. Not even a traffic ticket. None of the family members has even violated any immigration laws. They are all green card holders. And Maryam had a pending citizenship application.
So how could Rubio possibly justify detaining them like this? How could he rationalize keeping a high school student in a makeshift prison camp that was meant for the “worst of the worst”?
The answer is stupider and more enraging than you could possibly imagine.
We are imprisoning Maryam, Eissa, and their teenage son not because they are a threat to national security—but because of something a family member did before any of them were born.
MASOUMEH EBTEKAR, EISSA’S MOTHER, was the spokesperson for the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held fifty-two people hostage for over a year. The American media dubbed her “Screaming Mary” for her frequent appearances before Western media. A “reformist” (the less conservative Iranian political faction), Ebtekar went on to serve the Iranian regime in various high-level government positions and is currently a professor in Tehran.
Ebtekar’s past as the spokesperson for hostage takers is, of course, deeply condemnable.
What does this have to do with the family we are detaining now, though? Nothing, beyond the blood relation. The government has not provided any additional evidence about their alleged threat to national security. In announcing their detention, Rubio tweeted :
Masoumeh Ebtekar - also known as “Screaming Mary” - was the spokeswoman for the Islamic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days - subjecting them to beatings, starvation, and mock executions. . . . Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country. America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families - and under the Trump Administration, it never will.
In other words, these people had a family member who defended people who tortured Americans, so we are going to, in essence, torture them back.
Just last week, Rubio’s colleague, Vice President JD Vance, inveighed against exactly this sort of guilt-by-relation:
“The idea that because of your genetics, because of your blood, because of your ancestry, you are guilty of a crime you never committed. I think that blood libel . . . is the exact opposite of the Christian gospel.”
Vance got a lot wrong there, including what the “blood libel” is, but he got one thing right: It is an affront to God and country to punish someone for a crime committed by their ancestors. In this country, a place where freedom is supposed to reign and the rule of law is supreme, it is a betrayal of the promise of the founding to punish people based on their bloodline. It echoes the ugliest parts of our history—from slavery to Japanese internment.
MARYAM TAHMASEBI DOES NOT WANT to be a public person. She would rather her story not be told. She is scared and angry that her son’s name was doxxed by our government and that trolls have attacked him after the Nation first published her story . But after five months in hell, you get desperate. And she is willing to do anything to free her son.
For one hour a day, Maryam’s captors allow her to email to the outside world. No other access to the internet or search engines. Just one inbox. For the past week she’s been using that email to correspond with me about the conditions in Dilley, her family’s story, and their desperation, hoping that attention can lead to change.
Her first message came because a friend had emailed her a clip of Nicolle Wallace’s show where I mentioned her family’s plight along with that of Edgarianny Cortez Gervis , the pregnant Venezuelan mother who was trying to self-deport with her husband and 7-year-old. She had met that family in the Dilley detention camp.
Maryam’s email began starkly: “What I want above everything else [is] to leave this detention and have my family back together and for us to find a safe place to live.”
This simple desire, this basic human right, has been denied to them at every turn.
“The…
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