The withholding of a removal order that Reza Zavvar felt protected him from deportation is now being wielded by the Trump administration to send him to a country he doesn’t know.
Sharp knocks on the front door interrupted Firouzeh Firouzabadi’s Saturday morning coffee. On the porch of her suburban Maryland home were two law enforcement agents and a very familiar pit bull mix named Duke.
“Can you take this dog?” Firouzabadi recalled one of the men saying. “I said, ‘This is my son’s dog. Where is he?’ They wouldn’t say.”
At that moment, her adult son, Reza Zavvar, was handcuffed in the back of an SUV parked two houses down in the Gaithersburg neighborhood where the Iranian-born family has lived since 2009 — apprehended, he later said, that late June day by at least five federal immigration agents in tactical gear who told Zavvar they had been waiting for him to take Duke out for his regular morning walk.
More than a month later, Zavvar, 52, remains in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody,part of a surge of arrests of immigrants with standing court orders barring their deportation to their native countries.
The Trump administration has increasingly turned to sending people to third countries. In court papers, ICE said it plans to send Zavvar to Australia or Romania. He has no ties to either place.
Zavvar left Tehran alone when he was 12, arriving in Virginia in 1985 on a student visa secured by his parents as a way to escape eventual conscription into the Iranian army. He eventually received U.S. asylum, and then a green card.
His family joined him and they settled in Maryland, but in his 20s, Zavvar’s guilty pleas in two misdemeanor marijuana possession cases jeopardized his immigration status. In 2007, an immigration judge issued a withholding of removal order, determining it was unsafe for Zavvar to return to Iran. He built a life, went to college and has been working as a white-collar recruiter for a consulting firm.
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So he pleaded guilty 27 years ago to a couple marijuana possessions charges (legal today in 24-40 states, depending on purpose of usage) and now ICE wants to deport him to a third country (possibly Romania or Australia).
Click one of the links below to read the rest of the article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/08/03/immigration-arrests-third-country-removals
