There is no way Masoumeh Ebtekar, or “Screaming Mary” as she was known, should be allowed to enter or remain in the United States. She was the “spokesperson for the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held fifty-two people hostage for over a year.” She deserves our condemnation. She earned it.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio took his condemnation one step further.

Rubio tweeted:

Masoumeh Ebtekar – also known as “Screaming Mary” – was the spokeswoman for the Islamic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days – subjecting them to beatings, starvation, and mock executions. . . . Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country. America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families – and under the Trump Administration, it never will.

Screaming Mary is still in Tehran. But her daughter Maryam Tahmasebi, son-in-law and her grandson, are here.

For five months, Tahmasebi and her son have been locked in the Dilley Detention Center, along with other women and children held indefinitely in the Texas facility. Her husband, Eissa, is interned in a separate camp a twenty-minute drive away—not that she ever gets to go there. They can speak only a few minutes every couple of weeks. Eissa, like so many other detainees, has had basic medical treatment denied or delayed.

What did they do to deserve this?

You might imagine that such an extreme measure must have been taken because the family participated in drug smuggling or terrorism. Maybe this is a situation where they thought that family was plotting with al Qaeda cells?

Nothing like that. The government has provided no evidence the detainees pose any threat. They are not accused of any crime. No petty thefts. Not even a traffic ticket. None of the family members has even violated any immigration laws. They are all green card holders. And Maryam had a pending citizenship application.

If they’re here legally, and did absolutely nothing to warrant detention or removal, how did they end up in the notorious Dilley Center?

Their capture was the result of Marco Rubio’s decision to draw on a provision added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1990 that allows the secretary of state to designate a noncitizen as deportable if their presence leads to “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States. In this case, Rubio determined that the family is such a grave threat to our national security that they must be held captive indefinitely without basic due process rights.

The family’s “crime” is being descended from Screaming Mary. That, according to Rubio, constitutes a threat to our national security based on nothing more than lineage. This is “guilt-by-relation.”

Given the current atmosphere, both in terms of the war against Iran as well as the pervasive antagonism toward immigrants, it’s likely that many will shrug at Maryam Tahmasebi and her family’s circumstances. After all, she is the daughter of the contemptible Screaming Mary, and her son is, well, Mary’s grandson, so he’s tainted by her genetics to those who hold up their lineage to argue that they’re not real Americans, and anyone who isn’t should be sent away. Or worse.

“Besides the fact that I am from a secular middle class family myself, my husband avoided politics and also business,” she wrote. “He hasn’t traveled anywhere in the past 12 years that we have been in the US. He hasn’t set foot outside of the US borders and we have spent every day of the past 12 years either as graduate students or as professors working in higher education.”

Like so many others tormented by this administration, the family came to our shores hoping for opportunity. They wanted the picket-fence Norman Rockwell–era American dream that DHS harks back to. They were denied it simply because they came from the wrong place and were born to the wrong person.

This is who Rubio decided, entirely on his own, was such a threat to our national security that they couldn’t be allowed to remain free in America. Ironically, there are adverse foreign policy consequences to the imprisonment of Masoumeh Ebtekar’s offspring for the wrongs done to America. The consequence is that it shows that the United States is no longer the safe haven of liberty and democracy to which people can come to flee autocratic and theocratic nations, and to escape the sins of the grandmother.