Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation

Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation

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Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation

An Iranian couple seeking refuge in the United States faces a cruel new form of family separation.

Noah Hurowitz

September 21 2026, 3:36 p.m. ET

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!Mohammadjamal Azizi and his wife Hannaneh Alikaram in Sari, Iran, in 2024. Though the couple submitted nearly identical requests asylum, his bid was granted and hers was denied.

Mohammadjamal Azizi and his wife Hannaneh Alikaram in Sari, Iran, in 2024. Though the couple submitted nearly identical requests asylum, his bid was granted and hers was denied. Photo: Courtesy of Mohammadjamal “Liam” Azizi

An Iranian couple seeking refuge in the U.S. has been separated for nearly two years after separate immigration judges issued sharply diverging rulings on their nearly identical asylum applications.

Mohammadjamal Azizi and Hannaneh Alikaram requested asylum after arriving in the United States in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they would likely face as Christian converts in Iran, where they had twice been arrested due to their faith.

Since arriving in the U.S., they have faced sharply different versions of American justice, the result of a process advocates refer to bitterly as “immigration roulette”: Azizi — who goes by the name Liam — has been free for more than a year, after his asylum claim was granted, while Alikaram has suffered 21 months in detention, more than a year of that coming after her claim was rejected.

Until recently, it is likely that Alikaram would not have spent nearly as much time in detention as she has. But amid the twin agendas of mass detention and mass deportation, the Trump administration has swept aside years of precedent by locking up people who would previously have been allowed to fight their cases from outside detention, while going after communities formerly protected from deportation due to the likelihood of persecution back home.

Iranians have found themselves the crosshairs. Last year, amid the so-called 12-Day War between the U.S.–Israel and Iran, senior officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a scheme to begin deportations to Iran, a plan that resulted in three planes full of Iranian deportees being sent back to Iran on charter flights.

Those flights were suspended earlier this year after the U.S. and Israel launched the ongoing war on Iran, but multiple Iranians with final orders of removal have been deported to countries where they have no ties, including Panama and the Central African Republic. With so-called third-country flights leaving every month or so, Azizi and his wife live in constant fear that Alikaram might be put on a plane to a country where she knows no one and from which she has little hope of escaping.

Leaving detention after seven months, Azizi headed to the Iranian American hub of Los Angeles, where he has spent the past year working any job he can find to raise money for legal bills and fighting for his wife’s release. By the logic of the U.S. immigration system, that should be a simple prospect: As the spouse of an asylee, Alikaram is eligible for a status known as derivative asylum, a process intended to ensure family unification and act as a backstop against situations like the one in which Azizi and Alikaram find themselves, according to Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge fired by the Trump administration last year.

> “This is your money and my money that are being wasted in detaining this woman who is unquestionably eligible for asylum.”

“The person gets to have derivative asylum because family unity is a central tenet of our immigration system,” said Rey Caldas. “This is your money and my money that are being wasted in detaining this woman who is unquestionably eligible for asylum as the spouse of an individual that has been granted asylum.”

The couple currently has a petition for derivative asylum before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and have filed a petition for habeas corpus seeking to secure Alikaram’s release on the basis of prolonged detention. Amid the uncertainty, with no end in sight to his wife’s detention, Azizi said their separation — and his feeling of helplessness in the face of bureaucratic cruelty — weighs on him daily.

“Being separated from Hananneh is unbearable,” Azizi wrote in a statement to the court filed earlier this year. “Every night I go to sleep wondering if she is safe in detention. Every day I wake up with anxiety that she might be taken away from me and sent back to a country where she could be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed just because she sought freedom.”

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Azizi and Alikaram married in 2018 and lived together in Isfahan, Iran, where both had gone to university. Azizi worked as a software engineer, while Alikaram ran a greenhouse business, cultivating plants and posting playful videos to YouTube in which she coached plant lovers on topics ranging from prepping plants for autumn to guarding against pests. In the videos, which include jokey, spliced-in clips from “Lord of the Rings” and Miyazaki films, Alikaram comes across as a happy young woman enamored with the natural world.

The couple found their way to Christianity first through friends, members of Isfahan’s sizable minority of Armenian Christians. Christians have lived in Iran for more than a millennium, and Iran’s constitution affords protections allowing ethnoreligious communities, most notably Armenians and Assyrians, to practice their faith and organize their families and communities accordingly.

But the situation is very different for converts like Azizi and Alikaram, who are considered by Iran’s theocratic government to be apostates, and are subject to harsh punishments — up to and including execution. As a result, converts must worship in secret, in an underground network of so-called home churches.

It was in these home churches that the couple began exploring Christianity and where, in January 2024, they were baptized into the Anglican church. But it was also in a home church where the two met with their first experience of state terror, Azizi and Alikaram told The Intercept in telephone interviews and related in court documents. On March 5, 2024, they were worshipping with a handful of others in a home church in Isfahan when members of the pro-government Basij militia burst in, having been informed of the gathering by neighbors. Alikaram and Azizi, along with others, were taken into custody. Alikaram was beaten so badly she passed out and had to be hospitalized.

On June 9, 2024, after relocating for their own safety to the capital of Tehran, Alikaram and Azizi were arrested again on charges of practicing a foreign religion and inviting others to practice Christianity. She was held for two days, and he for four. After that ordeal, they decided it was time to leave. They secured a visa to enter Brazil, and left Iran on November 3, 2024. Five days later, a court in Tehran issued warrants for their arrest, according to court documents.

*Mohammadjamal Azizi and his wife Hannaneh Alikaram in Shiraz, Iran, in 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Mohammadjamal “Liam” Azizi*

Azizi and Alikaram entered the United States on December 26, 2024, after an arduous trip overland from Brazil that took them through more than half a dozen countries. En route, they