[Episcopal News Service] Two Iranian-born asylum-seekers who have been active for the past three years at an Episcopal church in suburban Washington, D.C., are fighting for their freedom after being detained by federal immigration agents and threatened with deportation.
Their congregation, St. Thomas Episcopal Church in McLean, Virginia, is praying for and rallying behind the two adult sisters, Mahan and Mozhan Motahari, as their lawyer argues for their release from a detention facility in Florida. An initial court date for one of the women is Dec. 10.
“These are people that are valued members of our community,” the Rev. Fran Gardner-Smith, St. Thomas’ rector, said in a Dec. 9 phone interview with Episcopal News Service. The sisters have been in the United States at least since fall 2022, when they were baptized at St. Thomas after first encountering Christianity in Iran, Gardner-Smith said. Until their detention, they had been involved in multiple ministries at St. Thomas, which has a significant number of members with Iranian heritage.
Gardner-Smith has been in contact with a third Motahari sister, who also lives in the capital region. The family has been devastated by news of the Motaharis’ detentions. “They’re just so scared. … They just want their family back together,” Gardner-Smith said. For the wider congregation, the sisters’ absence is “like someone cut off our arm.”
“They’re missing from us, and we are grieving,” she said.
The sisters were traveling with family over the Thanksgiving holiday when they were detained Dec. 1 at Cyril E. King Airport in the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands, according to social medial posts by Customs and Border Protection. The posts provided neither the women’s names or ages.
The Puerto Rico-based Border Patrol office posted to Facebook that the Motaharis were “illegal aliens from Iran” and had been “processed for removal proceedings,” and the office shared a photo of the sisters in custody. The primary Facebook account of Customs and Border Protection followed hours later with a snide riff on the women’s plight: “No fun in the sun when you are unlawfully present,” it said.
NS spoke by phone with Parastoo Zahedi, the lawyer representing the Motaharis, and she pushed back against Customs and Border Protection’s claims that the women are “unlawfully” in the United States. The two sisters have legally applied for asylum, and U.S. law typically allows asylum-seekers to remain in the country while they wait for hearings on their asylum claims.
That is “how every administration has interpreted this before,” Zahedi said, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump has tended to treat people like the Motaharis, who are correctly following the country’s asylum process, as in the country illegally — even though the sisters were recently granted five-year work permits by another government agency.
Normally, the Motaharis would have to wait a long time, sometimes up to 10 years, for their cases to be heard in immigration court because of the large backlog in asylum cases. As a kind of silver lining, their recent detention will allow them to more immediately make their legal case for staying. Zahedi also said a court order has blocked the government from deporting them while the case proceeds.
One of Zahedi’s top priorities is to bring them home from Broward Transitional Center, a federal detention facility in Pompano Beach, Florida. “Our hope is to be able to secure their release, so they don’t have to suffer in detention while their cases are being heard,” she said.
Gardner-Smith called the Motaharis “amazing women” whose sudden detention defies logic. “This all makes no sense to me,” she said.
“We are praying for a swift, just resolution that protects our sisters’ dignity and faith. We long for them to be returned to their family and to our community. The church is the body of Christ and ours is incomplete without them present.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.