Children and relatives of Iranian regime leaders are embedded at prestigious universities across the United States, teaching students, conducting research, and holding faculty positions at institutions from New York to Los Angeles. An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 relatives of prominent Iranian regime leaders and bureaucrats are living in the US, according to experts and dissidents, with hundreds more settled in Canada and Australia.
The list reads like a directory of American higher education's most respected names: the University of Massachusetts, Union College, George Washington University, Emory University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. At each, individuals tied to the Iranian theocracy hold or have recently held positions of influence.
The irony is breathtaking. The same regime whose supporters burn effigies of President Trump and whose government oversees a bloody crackdown on its own protesters sends its sons and daughters to enjoy the freedoms, salaries, and prestige of American academic life.
Start with Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, a cancer specialist and medical doctor who taught at Emory University in Atlanta and worked at the university's prestigious Winship Institute. She is connected to Ali Larijani, described as Iran's de facto leader following the death of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Larijani was killed in an airstrike on Tuesday. Emory parted ways with Ardeshir-Larijani in January, according to the New York Post. A Change.org petition urging the Trump administration to deport her has drawn more than 156,000 signatures.
Lawdan Bazargan, a human rights activist from the Alliance Against the Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, put it plainly:
"Fatemeh Larijani … the daughter of Ali Larijani came to the United States for cancer treatment, the very country her family's system condemns, while millions of Iranians are denied access to basic health care and opportunity."
Then there is Leila Khatami, a professor of mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She is the daughter of Mohammad Khatami, a Shia cleric who served as president of Iran from 1997 to 2005. After US airstrikes against Iran began last month, her photo and bio were quietly removed from the departmental webpage. A separate petition with more than 84,000 verified signatures has urged the Department of Homeland Security to investigate her immigration status.
The connections extend further:
A professor in nuclear engineering whose father held government positions in the Islamic Republic. The daughter of the man who helped build Iran's intelligence apparatus is now teaching at a public American university. These are not coincidences. They are patterns.
Western media and academic institutions have long operated under the assumption that there is a meaningful distinction between "reformists" and "hardliners" within Iran's political structure. This framing has provided convenient cover for regime-linked individuals to present themselves as moderates while benefiting from a system built on theocratic authoritarianism.
Bazargan dismantled this narrative directly:
"In practice, power in Iran is concentrated within a relatively closed network of interconnected families and political figures."
She went further:
"For a large part of Iranian society, the idea of 'reformist vs. hardliner' has lost its meaning. It is seen as an internal division within the same system. Yet Western media and some analysts continue to frame Iranian politics this way, which, in effect, helps prolong the life of the regime by suggesting that meaningful change can come from within it."
Consider Saeed Hajjarian, Zeinab's father. He co-founded the Ministry of Intelligence in 1983. Since the 1990s, he has styled himself as a "reformist political strategist." The rebranding is convenient but irrelevant. You don't get to help build the surveillance state and then claim reformist credentials because the decade changed.
Or take Masoumeh Ebtekar, a former vice president of the Islamic Republic who served as the highest-ranking woman in Iran's government up until 2021. Before her political career, she worked as a spokesperson for the student militants who held 52 American diplomats hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days during the 1979 revolution. American media nicknamed her "Screaming Mary." She has consistently defended hijab laws for women in Iran. This is who the regime calls a reformer.
Janatan Sayeh, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, raised the concern that should be at the center of this conversation:
"I would think that there would be a security risk as Iranian academics have been critical in forming public opinion on the left in the US, essentially deceiving liberals into thinking that the regime is more progressive, when it's still advancing the same hardline agenda."
That observation is worth sitting with. The function these individuals serve, whether intentionally or by proximity, is to sand down the regime's edges in the eyes of Western academics, students, and policymakers. A professor with an Iranian regime pedigree who presents as reasonable and credentialed does more for Tehran's image on an American campus than any propaganda broadcast ever could.
Sayeh also highlighted the practical difficulty of identifying these connections at all. Many are nephews, nieces, and in-laws who do not share last names with the regime figures they are related to. Tracking these family networks requires the kind of diligence that immigration vetting has not historically prioritized.
Zeinab Hajjarian herself offered a revealing window into her worldview in 2018, when she compared mandatory hijab enforcement to public decency laws in the West:
"There is no city in the world where you can walk naked in the streets and you won't be approached by a particular regulatory body."
Equating morality police who beat women for showing their hair with Western nudity ordinances is not a scholarly argument. It is regime apologetics dressed in academic language. That this came from someone teaching at an American public university is telling.
One critic of the regime on X captured the frustration of ordinary Iranians watching this unfold:
"They've turned Iran into a hell for us Iranians, while their children live in the West, holding key positions in universities and spreading anti-Western values."
This is the core contradiction. The regime's elite condemn America, restrict their own citizens' freedoms, deny them basic healthcare and opportunity, and then send their families to live comfortably in the very system they publicly despise. The children get American degrees and American paychecks. The Iranian people face a crackdown.
More than 156,000 people have signed a petition to deport Ardeshir-Larijani. Over 84,000 have asked DHS to investigate Khatami's immigration status. Public awareness is clearly ahead of institutional action.
American universities have spent years signaling their commitment to values like transparency, accountability, and human rights. They hold panels on authoritarianism. They issue statements condemning oppressive governments. They pride themselves on being places where truth is pursued without fear.
Now would be a fine time to start.
