3/25/2025 Panama (International Christian Concern) — A group of Iranian Christians has been given 30 days to leave Panama, where they were sent last month after seeking asylum in the U.S.
Their deportation, which took place even though their Christian faith is a crime punishable by death in their home country, has received significant attention across religious and secular news outlets in the weeks since.
Speaking with The New York Times, which broke her story last month, Artemis Ghasemzadeh — one of the Iranian Christians currently in Panama — told the story of her conversion from Islam to Christianity despite living in a country where leaving Islam is a crime punishable by death. Beginning with a chance visit to a church while traveling in Turkey, her journey of faith blossomed in Iran’s heavily persecuted network of underground churches.
Members of her Bible study were arrested, and many church gatherings took place online for fear of an in-person gathering attracting unwanted attention from authorities.
Together with her brother, she traveled to Mexico where they hired a smuggler to bring them to the United States, which has legal protections in place for those seeking asylum because of severe religious persecution. As she expected, she was quickly detained and held for processing. However, rather than hearing her asylum case, authorities instead quickly moved her to Panama.
When Ghasemzadeh was deported to Panama, presumably for processing back to Iran, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that none of those deported had requested asylum. Ghasemzadeh, however, reports that she repeatedly told officials she was an Iranian convert to Christianity and requested asylum based on the persecution she would face if she returned.
Today, now released from the hotel where she was initially quartered, Ghasemzadeh and others are being held at a camp in Saint Vincent, Panama, where inmates report crowded and unsanitary conditions.
Ghasemzadeh and those with her have been told that they have 30 days to leave the country but have nowhere to go.
One of the world’s few theocracies, the Iranian system is built on extreme devotion to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
After the overthrow of the secular but authoritarian monarchy in 1979, Iran swung hard toward Islamist extremism and has continued on that path ever since, with a growing security apparatus designed to suppress religious and political dissent in every corner of society.
Iran’s constitution, finalized soon after the 1979 revolution, is a religious manifesto that quotes the Quran extensively and mandates the military to fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in Allah’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of Allah’s law throughout the world.”
For religious minorities in Iran, there is no escape from the extremist policies of a government fueled by an extremist interpretation of Shia Islam that leaves no room even for Sunni Islam, much less religious minorities like Christianity.
Refoulement, or the forced return of refugees and asylum seekers to countries where they are likely to face persecution, is prohibited in numerous international treaty bodies, including the Convention against Torture and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). The United States is party to the Convention against Torture but has refused to sign the ICPPED.
Adherence to non-refoulement is, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an implicit guarantee flowing from the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill human rights.”
Justifying its decision to deport these Christians and others, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman claimed that “Not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.”
While the veracity of her claim is impossible to verify, the principle of non-refoulement applies to “all migrants at all times, irrespective of migration status,” according to the U.N. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
To read more news stories, visit the ICC Newsroom. For interviews, please email press@persecution.org.
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