By Joshua Arnold

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested at least 16 Iranian nationals this week, after a U.S. airstrike on the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons facilities on Saturday. Despite the Israel-Iran ceasefire and Iran’s non-escalatory counterstrike, officials remain concerned about the ongoing threat of potential Iranian sleeper agents embedded within America.

In a Sunday bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declared a three-month-long “heightened threat environment” due to “the ongoing Iran conflict,” set to last until September 22. The open conflict ended soon afterward, but that resolution did not eliminate the covert threat. As DHS stated, “Iran also has a long-standing commitment to target U.S. Government officials it views as responsible for the death of an Iranian military commander killed in January 2020” — chief among them, President Donald Trump.

Accordingly, ICE — a component part of DHS — spent its weekend tracking down at least 16 Iranian nationals viewed as most dangerous. In a Tuesday press release, DHS announced the arrest of 11 Iranian nationals (nine on Sunday, two on Monday). Fox News later reported on another five Iranians arrested by ICE on Monday.

Yet these represent a small fraction of all the Iranian illegal immigrants living in America. During the Biden administration, immigration officials released more than 700 Iranians into the U.S. (border czar Tom Homan estimates the number is actually more than 1,200).

According to the DHS press release, almost all of those arrested have criminal records (aside from their illegal presence in the U.S.), and in five cases, judges have already issued deportation orders:

• Four of the Iranians were convicted of drug-related crimes, including selling cocaine.
• Four more were convicted for assault, domestic violence, or child sexual abuse.
• One was arrested for choking his wife, who obtained a restraining order against him; he “was carrying a loaded 9mm pistol at the time of his arrest.”
• Two others were convicted on gun offenses, including “a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with admitted connections to Hezbollah.”
• Two were convicted of forgery and criminal impersonation.
• One had his residency status terminated in October 2017 after the U.S. government determined he lied on his original visa application. He was placed on the terror watch list in February.
• One Iranian, who was processed for expedited removal when the Biden administration released him in June 2023, apparently lacked the criminal record of the others, but he was found to be living with one of the other arrested Iranians, a violent drug offender who has a deportation order against him dating to the Reagan administration.
• The last arrested Iranian also lacked an overt criminal record but was perceived as a threat. He reportedly served as a sniper in the Iranian Army from 2018 to 2021 and still had an Islamic Republic of Iran identification card in his possession.

The arrest of this last Iranian, Ribyar Karimi, led the DHS press release because of its potential to suggest a grave national security threat to the imagination. But it also proved to be the most controversial, after Karimi’s American wife Morgan began advocating for his release. This would naturally generate sympathetic news coverage, which is made more sympathetic by the fact that Morgan is 31 weeks pregnant.

Karimi “entered the U.S. on a K-1 visa, which is reserved for aliens engaged to be married to American citizens, in October 2024 under the Biden administration,” the DHS press release explained. Ribyar Karimi married his fiancée Morgan in January 2025 (that is, 25 weeks ago at most). The legal basis for removing him from the U.S. is that “Karimi never adjusted his status — a legal requirement,” DHS added.

Morgan Karimi called concerns about her husband’s military experience “exaggerated,” arguing that Iranians “are required to serve 2 years, mandatory, or you can’t get a passport to leave. All of this was turned into immigration during his visa process, and he passed a background check.” She added that her husband “loves our country” and spent his military career fighting ISIS, not Americans.

From the limited information available, it’s hard to know what the truth is. Morgan’s account seems sympathetic and genuine — not only a wife fighting for her husband, but a soon-to-be mother facing the unexpected prospect of raising the child alone. Additionally, we Americans love to hear the classic story of a foreign immigrant coming to America because he loves this free country.

Yet man’s fallen nature also makes him capable of lies, even elaborate and hardened lies. Two decades ago, the FBI unraveled a network of Russian spies buried deep undercover inside the U.S. These spies got married, held jobs, raised kids, went to school, and even attended 4th of July parties — all the while secretly feeding information back to Moscow.

In other words, just because someone seems like a normal, loyal American doesn’t make them a normal, loyal American. Yet this logic could destroy what is left of social trust in our country, if taken too far. Fortunately, foreign sleeper agents are rare.

On the other hand, it seems highly probably that Iran has planted at least a few such sleeper agents inside the U.S. Their hatred for America is well-known. They prefer asymmetric ways to destabilize their adversaries, versus direct confrontation. And they have had a perfect opportunity to slip in hundreds of such agents across America’s porous southern border during the derelict Biden administration.

How would America detect such sleeper agents? Unfortunately, the better the agent, the more they would fit in, and the harder they would be to detect. A young husband and father like Karimi, domiciled in a rural hamlet like Locust Fork, Ala. (population 1,200) would be a perfect cover.

Of course, human governments are incompetent to determine a person’s internal thoughts and motives, except so far as they can be proven by physical evidence. Perhaps Karimi is the family man his wife believes him to be, who did what was necessary to escape Iran, who loves America, and who merely forgot to update his immigration status upon his marriage. Perhaps there is more to the story.

Determining such questions is why America has courts of law, where evidence can be presented and questioned in a fair and open forum. Such due process is important to reaching a just outcome, as opposed to merely a pre-determined one.

Americans have shown a tendency to distrust those ethnically related to our wartime adversaries (e.g., Japanese internment during WWII), but we must not cross the line into lawless oppression by locking up innocent people without just cause. After all, American identity is not defined by ethnicity, but by a commitment to certain basic ideals — popular representation, freedom, individual rights, etc. We cannot uphold these principles by betraying them. Hopefully, the Trump administration will see that these arrested Iranians receive due process.

In general, however, ICE’s weekend roundup was an unarguable success. Most of the Iranian arrestees have already been convicted of violent crimes in a court of law, and some have already been deemed deportable. By taking them off the streets of America in half a dozen states, ICE just made the U.S.A. that much safer.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.