The Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) Task Force on Civil and Human Rights expresses our deep concern regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of visa and green card holders from Iran, including Iranian academics and students, based on their familial ties and political views. While immigration-based targeting of Iranians, including professors and students, began in 2025, these efforts have accelerated since the start of 2026 and especially since the Israel/ U.S. war against Iran began in late February.
Among the most prominent cases, in early April, the State Department terminated the permanent residency of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, an assistant professor at Emory University’s medical school, because her then-deceased father, Ali Larijani, had been a high-ranking Iranian official. The State Department also detained and revoked the green card of Eissa Hashemi, an adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, because his mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, had been involved in the student takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Later in April, the administration detained Yousuf Azizi, a PhD candidate at the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs, and sought to deport him from the country. While the administration raised various visa-related pretexts for detaining Azizi, it is widely believed he was targeted because of his outspoken and widely-publicized opposition to the war on Iran.
This repressive campaign against Iranian academics and students is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s long-standing draconian immigration policies, which have involved targeting students and academics for their First Amendment-protected views as well as their familial associations. In a recent case brought by MESA, a federal judge made clear that the First Amendment applies to citizens and non-citizens alike. Targeting Iranian visa and green card holders solely for their protected speech and familial ties flies in the face of this basic principle: that noncitizens present in the United States have the same speech and associational rights as citizens.
MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.
As long as the Trump administration continues to target academics and students who work on or are from the Middle East for their views and associational relationships, MESA will continue to support and defend those individuals against the government’s repressive and unconstitutional policies.