LOS ANGELES: Pastor Ara Torosian received a distressed phone call from two Iranian members of his Farsi-speaking church on Tuesday — US federal immigration officers were at their Los Angeles home to arrest them.
It was the second such call he received this week.
On Monday, an Iranian couple with a 3-year-old was detained at a routine immigration appointment, Torosian said.
Both families were recently arrived asylum seekers, who had entered the United States at the US-Mexico border after making an appointment, he said.
The appointment system, known as CBP One, was launched by former US president Joe Biden to promote orderly border crossings. President Donald Trump ended the program when he took office, as part of his aggressive crackdown on immigration.
Torosian said when he arrived at the couple’s home on Tuesday he saw an “army” of federal law enforcement officers and began filming on his cell phone as officers stopped him from getting close to his church members.
As officers restrained the woman being detained she started to have a panic attack and began convulsing on the floor, he said.
“She’s sick! Call 911!” Torosian is heard shouting on the video. “Why are you guys doing this?”
Torosian said the couple fled religious persecution in Iran.
In a statement on X, the Department of Homeland Security said that it detained two Iranian nationals in Los Angeles on Tuesday, who had been flagged for national security reasons. It said the woman was taken to hospital, but was later discharged and both are now in immigration custody.
The arrests came after US military bombers carried out strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities in the early hours of Sunday morning local time. In a press release on Tuesday, the DHS said it had arrested 11 Iranians in the country illegally over the weekend.
Iran doesn’t accept deportees from the United States, but on Monday, the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face there.
Torosian said his congregation has between 50 and 60 members, most of whom have been in the country for less than two years. He said he is telling them to stay home rather than come to church.
“In a million years, a million years, I never imagined, one day I can call my members and tell them that better not to come to the church, because as I know, America is a free country, but they’re afraid,” Torosian said. “Some of them lock themselves in their house.”
Torosian himself is a naturalised US citizen. He said the arrest he witnessed was traumatic.
“When I was seeing the masked soldiers put down a woman, a female, on the ground, it triggered me,” he said. “I’m on the street of Los Angeles or the street of Tehran? So that was what made me very sad and I cried a lot.”
