Madonna ‘Donna’ Kashanian, 64, was taken by plainclothes officers from her home in New Orleans
A 64-year-old Iranian woman, who has lived in the US for 47 years, was detained by immigration agents on Sunday morning while gardening outside her home in New Orleans.
According to a witness, plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles handcuffed Madonna “Donna” Kashanian and transported her to a Mississippi jail before transferring her to the South Louisiana Ice processing center in Basile, reports Nola.
Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran. Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met.
Likely because her reasoning and fears were at odds with our geopolitics. It’d be like us accepting South Korean refugees for their fear of North Korean reprisal…if North Korea had largely been subsumed and the war was over for several years.
Your analogy makes no sense. This woman came here in 1978 and the Shah was booted in 1979. It is entirely believable that she would have faced reprisals in Iran during the massacres of 1981.
I don’t know why this woman was denied asylum but her request was well justified by events.
She first came in as a student in 78 but applied for asylum later. And that kind of thing can take a long time to process, years even.
To put it more directly, accepting her request would be a tacit admission that US foreign policy made Iran a more dangerous place, not by accident, but as a side effect of its success.
She arrived before the Iranian revolution. Going back after the revolution with a Western education means at the very least she would have been deemed very very very suspicious. And why would a new paranoid religious government take the risk at all? Easier to purge.