Tides Keep Turning
University of Alabama graduate student Alireza Doroudi has chosen to self-deport to Iran after being in detention for 42 days. Doroudi was not detained by ICE during some kind of legal violation, or even during a protest, he was at his apartment at 3am when ICE arrived and removed him. Doroudi insisted that, “If they had just sent me a letter asking me to appear in court, I would’ve come, because I didn’t do anything illegal. I stayed with their permission.” He was going to face more hearings and all the while remain in detention, and so he ultimately told his lawyer: “I love this country, but they don’t want me here so I will go home.”
Much like the harrowing case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the State Department indicated that Doroudi’s initial arrest was an error. Evidently some change to his student visa would only have been revoked if he left the U.S. But the process of proving this was going to require him to remain in federal custody. Can we blame him for choosing to cut his losses and avoid literal federal prison?
“‘When due process is delayed or denied, when charges are sustained without standing, and when individuals are forced to choose between uncertain length of detention in a country they feel no longer wants them, or leaving voluntarily, we must ask what kind of precedent we are setting not just for foreign students, but for fairness and justice in America,’ [Doroudi’s lawyer David] Rozas said.”
This case of Doroudi hits close to home. But it’s not the only one, and it’s implications are much further reaching than the lives of these individuals and their loved ones. It shows us that the current U.S. administration is not upholding the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution:
No State shall…deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
But more than just being close to home (roll tide), or having chilling domestic implications, it feels like the foreign policy implications are worth noting too. The governments of the US and Iran are certainly not on good terms right now, and haven’t been since Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. But how might Iranians feel? Certainly not all Iranians support their autocratic clerical government - massive protests in 2022-2023 are one indication of this. But the U.S. has given Iranians little reason for trust. The 1979 Islamic revolution was made possible in part not only by Ruhollah Khomeni and his followers, who ultimately took control of the government, but by a host of moderate and left-leaning opponents of the oppressive Muhammad Reza Shah - many of whom ended up opposing the establishment of an Islamic republic. The Shah who was taken down in 1979 was a staunch ally of the United States, but arguably not of his own people: his economic oppression and political suppression were crippling for many Iranians. If the U.S. support for such a leader and his secret police wasn’t bad enough, the involvement of the American CIA (and British MI6) in the coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 was a more longstanding reason for popular opposition to the U.S. and the West. All that to say, what will it look like when Doroudi returns to Iran? Doroudi’s graduate degree could have been a testament to American opportunity (or heck, even to so-called southern hospitality), his arrest, imprisonment, and deportation only reinforces Iranian-American distrust. This willingness to forego soft power is not nearly as colossal as that of the cancellation of USAID, but it still seems like something.
Doroudi, you think that we don’t want you here, but many of us are happy to have you. I’m glad that some of your colleagues rallied to your support. I’m sorry that your life, your degree, and your engagement have been derailed by this (as a PhD graduate myself, and as someone who has lived abroad, I have a glimmer of a sense of how devastating and indelible this must all be). What many of us do not want is the repressive detention system that our current administration (celebrated - but also protested - in Tuscaloosa the same week you chose to self deport) is proudly steamrolling.
