WASHINGTON (RNS) — When sisters Mahan and Mozhan Motahari first came to St. Thomas Episcopal Church in McLean, Virginia, in 2022, they were “deeply joyful,” said the Rev. Fran Gardner-Smith, the church’s rector. In Iran, their home country where they first encountered Christianity, they would have risked death, imprisonment, or torture to be baptized publicly because it’s illegal for Muslims to convert.
But in Virginia, they were “finally able to practice their faith in the open,” Gardner-Smith told Religion News Service.
“They are regular hosts of our fellowship time after church,” she said, adding that the Maryland-based sisters were baptized in 2022, the same year they arrived in the U.S. “They are regulars at worship. They bring other members of their family with them sometimes. We have a pumpkin patch in the fall and so they’ve volunteered with the pumpkin patch.”
But the priest said she and her congregation were shocked when U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a photo of the two young women Wednesday (Dec. 3) on X and other social media platforms. In a caption, the agency claimed the pair had been arrested at an airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands when the women were “determined to be illegally present in the U.S.”
A Dec. 3, 2025, social media post by U.S. Customs and Border Protection about the arrest of Mahan and Mozhan Motahari. (Screen grab)
“No fun in the sun when you are unlawfully present,” the post read, continuing ” … the two women were arrested and transported to be processed for removal.”
The government agency’s post has rocked the small congregation, Gardner-Smith said, leaving the community — which includes other people from Iran — “gutted.”
“We all feel a wound in our body of Christ, knowing what’s happening to them,” Gardner-Smith said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But Parastoo G. Zahedi, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer now representing the sisters, rejected the claim that they were in the U.S. illegally. The Motaharis received notice that they were allowed to stay in the U.S. as their asylum claims are processed, Zahedi said, and had twice received employment authorization documents — the most current of which were valid through 2030. They were in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she said, on a family trip.
Zahedi also noted that she was alarmed by CBP’s social media post, as by publicly sharing images of the women, the government potentially heightened the risks they face back in Iran.
“What bothered me more than anything else is that they’re seeking asylum protection from the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I first saw the sharing of their information on Iranian social media sites,” she said. “Now, there are pictures of them without hijab, and it’s now common knowledge that they are in the U.S. seeking asylum.”
Zahedi added, “That’s something we expect the government to hold in confidence.”
The sisters’ arrest and potential deportation follows previous reports that President Donald Trump’s administration is deporting Iranian Christians with active asylum claims. This issue garnered widespread attention in June, when a dramatic video was shared widely on social media showing masked federal agents in Los Angeles detaining two Iranian Christians. The video — which was filmed by the couple’s pastor, Ara Torosian — showed one officer standing over one of the arrested as she lay convulsing on the ground, having what Torosian described as a panic attack.
In the footage, Torosian can be heard telling an officer that at least one of the two people being detained had an asylum claim. The agent responded: “It doesn’t matter, sir, we’re just following orders, he’s got a warrant.”
Pastor Ara Torosian draws attention to detained Iranian Christians while on a hunger strike in front of the White House, July 23, 2025, in Washington. (Photo by David Ian Klein, File)
Torosian later visited lawmakers in Washington and staged a hunger strike to protest the detention of what he claimed were around 200 Iranian Christians in immigration custody. The topic made headlines again in late September and early October, when roughly 100 Iranians living in the U.S. were deported on a flight to Iran. In a Facebook post, Torosian claimed the flight included “an estimated 15 Iranian Christian converts, along with political and ethnic asylum seekers.”
On Sunday, another plane carried around 50 Iranians deported by the Trump administration to Iran, according to The New York Times.
The targeting of Iranians in the U.S. by the Trump administration ramped up after the U.S. launched military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites this summer in support of Israel. But allegations of arresting and deporting Iranian Christians signals a shift for the president and the Republican Party, which has long referred to the persecution of Christians in Iran when criticizing the country.
In a 2020 speech during his first term at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump highlighted a woman who was imprisoned in Iran for converting to Christianity, while explaining how he believed his administration was “standing up for persecuted Christians and religious minorities all around the world.”
As for the Motahari sisters, Zahedi said the two are “very distressed” as they remain in detention in Florida. Hoping to have the case expedited, Zahedi said she plans to continue “aggressively” arguing their case in court.
Meanwhile, Gardner-Smith said St. Thomas congregants prayed for the sisters over the weekend, and the church’s intentional prayer ministry is praying for them daily. The priest also met privately with Iranian members of her congregation after church, helping answer their questions. While members of the community are deeply supportive of the sisters, she said, they are also now “anxious about whether they would face danger as well.”
Clergy from the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida are working to see if they can visit the pair in their detention, although a church official said they “are facing significant hurdles.” Church leaders have also been in contact with several lawmakers, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who is Episcopalian. A spokesperson for Van Hollen’s office confirmed to RNS on Tuesday that his team “is in touch with the family as of this morning, but we do not share details of constituent cases as a matter of privacy.”
But in the meantime, Gardner-Smith said she worries the sisters will be “imprisoned, tortured and killed” if they are returned to Iran.
“For folks who come from Iran and who are Christian, their lives are really at risk if they go back,” Gardner-Smith said.
