March 28, 2025
The Iranian PhD student is one of several abducted by ICE in the past month—a pattern we cannot become numb to.
Alireza Doroudi on the University of Alabama’s campus.
(Facebook)
Earlier this week, University of Alabama PhD student and Iranian citizen Alireza Doroudi was abducted from his home at 5 am and disappeared by the US Government. As of March 28, Doroudi was moved by ICE to a jail in Jena, Louisiana. Initially, it was unclear where he had been taken; three days later, he has still not been charged with a crime.
Doroudi’s attorney, David Rozas, told the AP: “In the words of his fiancé, he is a nerd. All he does is study and is literally trying to fulfill his dream, the American dream, of becoming a researcher and professor of mechanical engineering.” Rozas also said that Doroudi had “not been arrested for any crime, nor has he participated in any anti-government protests.”
So far, there is no evidence that Doroudi wrote or said anything about Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza—the Trump administration’s unconstitutional, altogether illegal pretense for going after international student visas over the past month. Doroudi’s arrest is yet more evidence that their entire “antisemitic administration against antisemitism” battle plan is something they can take or leave as a pretense for kidnapping international students and shredding due process. So far, all the Department of Homeland Security has said about the arrest is that he “posed significant national security concerns,” without giving details.
Was it a random abduction because Doroudi is an Iranian citizen and any pretense to provoke Iran into war is part of this administration’s agenda? Is Netanyahu, in his clamoring for attacks on Iran, unilaterally rewriting, or at minimum inspiring, how we now do policing in this country? Were the years of “pacification” training US police chiefs and officers received in Israel just seeding the ground for this moment? Did DHS assume that if it singled out someone at the University of Alabama, neither the community nor the school’s administration would be up in arms? Is there an irony in a school so dependent on Black football players for its notoriety and largesse not intervening in what might be a purely racist targeting? I’m just asking questions.
It’s hard not to focus on the “American dream” part of Doroudi’s lawyer’s plea. Instead of streets paved with gold, he ends up in indefinite detention. This is exactly what would have happened to Marco Rubio’s grandfather when he fled Fulgencio Batista’s right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s. I guess when his gramps told horror stories of Batista’s secret prisons where people were tortured, baby Marco was taking notes. Grandpa Rubio remained in the United States illegally before going back to Cuba to help Castro, then returned to the US on a “vacation” only to be detained as an undocumented immigrant. He was set to be deported,