Some Iranian Visa Holders Sent Home

Some Iranian citizens traveling to Santa Clara this weekend for a reunion of graduates and professors from a Tehran university have been stopped at U.S. airports and told the visas they were carrying had been revoked.

The State Department on Thursday refused to say why some Iranians coming to the conference with visas approved by U.S. consulates abroad are being denied entry, detained overnight and then sent back to Iran. Event organizers said they know of 20 who have so far been turned away. More than 100 additional Iranian nationals are due at the weekend event.

"We knew that it was going to be difficult to get U.S. visas for the Iranians," said Fredun Hojabri of San Diego, founder of the Sharif University of Technology Association, a worldwide group of former students and professors associated with the 40-year-old school. But Hojabri said over the course of four months he had helped about 150 prospective participants at this weekend's combination reunion and conference work through the process to get visas.

Among those whose visas were revoked was Ali Edrissi, a doctoral student at Sharif University. Bahman Pouranpir, Edrissi's uncle and an industrial engineer from Irvine, waited for about six hours at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday for Edrissi and his bride, Sara Nadimi.

"We were so panicked and so shocked, I didn't know what to do," said Pouranpir. Edrissi was put on a flight back home on Wednesday.

"I think before that USA was a very law-abiding country and they gave rights to someone," Edrissi said in a telephone interview from his home in Tehran on Thursday night. "After, I never go to USA anymore. I will never. They give me 1 million dollars, I will not go to USA because that was a bad experience."

Edrissi said after immigration officials pulled him and his wife aside, they said he would be going to a detention facility and his wife to a hotel. Some of those stopped at LAX were sent to a detention center in Santa Ana.

But after Edrissi pleaded with a supervisor -- who he said was kind -- the couple were allowed to sleep on chairs in a room at the airport Tuesday night.

Both he and his wife wept, he said.

"I don't expect this to happen," Edrissi added. "If the visa was given then they shouldn't take it back."

The Santa Clara reunion was characterized by those attending as a run-of-the-mill gathering of old classmates and colleagues.

Most of the Iranians who wanted to come here were given visas while some were denied, Hojabri said. But beginning early this week, he began to get messages from participants that they, and in some cases their families, were being sent back to Iran.

An unknown number were stopped at LAX. Hojabri said he also believes some were blocked from entering in Chicago and Toronto.

"We're not political," said Hojabri, who has lived in the United States since 1981 and is a former UC San Diego professor. "We are an association mostly to help each other scientifically and professionally."

Word of the visa revocations began spreading Thursday in the Iranian-American community. A notice of it was posted on iranian.com and mentioned on an Iranian radio station.

The group's Web site shows that about 600 people have registered for the conference, many from the United States, including 20 from Orange County.

The association holds such a meeting every two years. Federal officials refused Thursday to discuss the specifics of this case. Hojabri said early this week he sent an e-mail to U.S. consular officials in Dubai -- where many of the visas to the Iranian nationals were granted -- asking what was wrong. "They haven't responded," he said.

Iran is one of five countries listed as states that sponsor terrorism and as such, visa applications from there are scrutinized more closely than from other countries. The U.S. does not have an embassy or consulate there, which is why the Iranians seeking to come here had to get their visas from Dubai and other consulates.

It is not unheard of for a visa to be approved and then revoked, even after the foreign visitor has already arrived in the United States. But officials would not say why people coming to this conference were denied entry.

"In my experience this only happens in narrow situations in which some additional information is made available that allows for a revocation," said Irvine immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli. "I have never seen it happen in the context of a gathering of this size where it does not appear that the information applies to a particular individual but applying to everyone who wants to come to the gathering."

Hojabri surmised that the recent events in the Middle East coupled with the Iranian nuclear development issue may have led to this week's actions. Again, State Department officials would not respond to such speculation. Hojabri did say that some Iranian citizens have been allowed in.

"Our main point is how can you give them visas after all the security checks were done and then revoke them without giving them advance notice, let them travel all the way to the United States with family, and then not let them in?"

There are two ways someone with a visa could be denied entry to the United States -- the State Department can rescind a visa or the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection can decide at a port of entry that someone presenting the visa should not be admitted.

"I don't have any information that DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) has revoked the visas," said DHS spokesman Jarrod Agen, who referred calls to the State Department, which refused comment.

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