White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration is making it a “top priority” to remove people living in the United States illegally or through fraudulent means, including some with ties to the Iranian government, after the State Department said two relatives of slain Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani were taken into ICE custody for deportation proceedings.
In an interview published April 8, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Daily Wire correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan that the administration considers it a “top priority” to remove people who are in the United States “illegally or fraudulently,” and said the State Department is working “in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security” on such cases.
Leavitt’s comments followed a State Department account of the detention of Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, 47, and Sarinasadat Hosseiny, 25, whom the department identified as the niece and grandniece of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed in a U.S. strike in 2020. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the two women were in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Leavitt said she understood that one of them had been found to have made a “fraudulent asylum claim.”
The Daily Wire report said the two women posted photos on social media showing them in designer clothing and beachwear, while noting that Iran enforces mandatory head covering and other restrictions on women’s dress. In a post on X cited by the State Department and reported by the Daily Wire, Rubio accused Afshar of supporting Iran’s government and celebrating attacks on Americans while living in the United States.
The Daily Wire also cited a New York Post report about Eissa Hashemi, 43, describing him as the son of former Iranian vice president Masoumeh Ebtekar, who was dubbed “Screaming Mary” by some U.S. media during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis when she served as an English-speaking spokesperson for the student militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The Post report said Hashemi has lived in the United States since 2010 and is working as an adjunct associate professor at The Chicago School’s Los Angeles campus. Those claims could not be independently verified from publicly available university records in this review.
Separately, reporting by The Associated Press and other outlets has described U.S.-Iran negotiations and flights related to deportations of Iranian nationals. In September 2025, Iranian officials said the United States planned to deport hundreds of Iranians, with Iranian state media citing an estimate of up to 400 people; the U.S. did not publicly confirm the figure at the time, though a White House spokesperson said the administration was pursuing large-scale deportations of people in the country illegally. In December 2025, Iranian officials acknowledged that a flight carried 55 Iranian deportees from the United States.
U.S. immigration authorities have not publicly released case-by-case details for all removals involving Iranian nationals, and ICE has said it does not confirm or deny specific removal flights for operational security.
