Dear fellow MoveOn member,
My father, Dr. Sirous Asgari, is being unjustly detained by ICE in the middle of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and we need your help to free him so he can return to his life and job as a professor in Iran.
The detention center where he is being held already has cases of COVID-19, and I am worried that my father won't survive this unjust detention because of his history of lung infection and pneumonia. This is a life-or-death situation for my father and my family, and so far, all requests by my father's attorney to release him have been rejected.
My father earned his Ph.D. in material science and engineering from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1997. He now teaches at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. He and our mother received tourist visas to visit us in 2017. But our father's tourist visa was not properly stamped by U.S. Customs, making him lose his status and become undocumented.
The minute my parents stepped off the plane, my father was arrested by the FBI on charges that were ultimately dismissed. After more than two years of legal battles, he was exonerated in federal court in Ohio on November 15, 2019, but he was immediately taken into custody by ICE.
Since then, our dad has been held at four different ICE facilities. In just the last month, in the midst of a global pandemic, he has been forced on nine different flights among numerous other detained people. Now, we have learned he was exposed to someone who was very likely infected with COVID-19. Because of that, he was transferred to a different ICE facility in Louisiana.
He has been living in a room with between 29 and 44 detainees under horrible conditions. He sleeps on a rusted metal bed, in a humid room that makes the bed sheets constantly wet. They have only one shower and two toilets and no access to clean clothes. There is no sunlight or a view outside, and all the windows are covered. There are no "social distancing" or sanitation measures to protect them from COVID-19.
In the middle of a pandemic, when officials are worried about prisons and detention facilities becoming petri dishes for COVID-19, my father is trapped in custody—when all he wants to do is return to Iran and join my family so we can resume our lives.
ICE, please release my father immediately. His detention should not be a death sentence during this pandemic.
Click here to add your name to this petition, and then pass it along to your friends.
Thanks for all you do.
—Zahra Asgari
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