THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 39
posal only after submitting it to the in-
stitute. Asgari ultimately judged the proj-
ect impracticable.
Such was the heart of the prosecu-
tion: a recipe Asgari never asked for and
never used, a faulty data set, and a stu-
dent’s amateurish grant proposal that
went nowhere. The visa and wire-fraud
counts were similarly flimsy. The defense
filed a motion to dismiss all charges.
G
win accepted the defense’s motion.
But he wasn’t ready to dismiss the
case just yet: he had found the arguments
interesting, and hoped to write an opin-
ion for the record. Until he had done so,
he asked Asgari to remain in the coun-
try, on bond. Asgari’s lawyers assured the
judge that, once the case was formally
dismissed, he would self-deport, return-
ing to Iran on a commercial flight.
He didn’t get the chance. The pros-
ecution, evidently sensing that the case
was not going its way, had quietly in-
formed ice that it no longer wished to
defer Asgari’s deportation: the agency
could come collect its prisoner. No sooner
had Judge Gwin departed the courtroom
than a marshal seated in the gallery ap-
proached the defense table to haul Asgari
into ice custody.
The turn of events was stunning. As-
gari had just been acquitted in a fair trial
before a federal judge, but would end the
day in prison. By all appearances, the
government was acting out of vindic-
tiveness. (Riedl, the prosecutor, declined
to be interviewed.)
“He’s going to self-deport!” Newman
protested to the marshal.
“You’re coming with me,” the mar-
shal told Asgari, and marched him from
the courtroom.
Only the two legal teams remained,
in a cavernous silence—the prosecutors
with their backs to the defense, shuffling
papers into briefcases while Bryan fumed
and paced. Finally, he erupted. “This is
bullshit,” he said. “It was always bullshit!”
T
he day Asgari was cleared of all
charges, he began a seven-month
descent down a spiral of squalor, into a
vast carceral system beyond the reach of
the U.S. judiciary. Within the realm of
ice, there would be no public documents,
no legal hearings. His federal defenders
could not help him.
He was taken to the Northeast Ohio
Correctional Center, a private prison, in
Youngstown, that housed both convicted
criminals and ice detainees. There were
fears of a chicken-pox outbreak when he
arrived, and high-security prisoners kicked
their doors late into the night. The food
sickened him, and he assumed a strict
diet of ramen noodles with dried vegetable
flakes, obtained from the commissary.
His pod held forty-odd ice inmates,
many of them from Sri Lanka, India,
and Bangladesh. He was impressed by
their stories of migration—some had
made months-long treks through jun-
gles—and touched by the idealism of
young men who had expected to find
asylum in America. “They are really fol-
lowers of Columbus,” Asgari told me.
One was teaching him the Tamil lan-
guage, others about Buddhism. “I told
them if they want to learn anything in
physics, I can help,” he said. Several times
a week, he called me; we talked until his
phone line mechanically disconnected.
One day, I told him that I had gone to
an electron-microscopy lab in New York,
to view the instruments of his trade. That
night, for the first time in two years, he
dreamed that he was working with a
tem. “I was doing all sorts of operations,
chemical analysis, high resolution, and
enjoying it like crazy,” he told me. “I woke
up feeling so relaxed.”
He tried to befriend some of the high-
security prisoners. One, from Myanmar,
was so dejected that for entire days he
sat on his cot with a blanket over his
head. Asgari knocked on his window,
waving a chess board, and soon he and
the prisoner had a game going, Asgari
outside the cell door, the Burmese man
standing on a chair so that he could see
the board and point to moves. The pris-
oner attempted suicide, and a guard asked
Asgari to talk to him. He found the man
stark naked, pounding on his door. “His
face—he was gone,” Asgari told me.
Almost every week, he took on a new
cause, and he amiably needled the cor-
rections officers. When a guard confis-
cated the cartons of milk that detainees
kept on their windowsills, it was explained
to Asgari that drug dealers in a criminal
pod had made holes in the windows to
distribute their goods and hidden the
holes behind the cartons. Asgari pro-
tested that the ice detainees had done
nothing wrong and just wanted milk for
their coffee. He argued that next the de-
tainees would lose their hands—or, God
forbid, other body parts—if inmates in
another pod misused theirs. He won the
milk cartons back.
After three months, Asgari was trans-
ferred, in the middle of the night, to Sen-
eca County Jail, south of Toledo. Sen-
eca was worse than Youngstown: some
sixty beds in an open room, spaced about
three feet apart; a single shower; three
filthy toilets without stalls; unremitting
noise and light. There were criminal
convicts in the pod alongside ice de-
tainees. All of that Asgari could have
handled. But his first conversation with
the officer in charge of the ice popula-
tion brought him up short. The agency
had apparently identified him as a leader
who stirred up trouble. “I’ve been filled
in about you,” she told him. “Don’t try
to be a kingpin here.”
Asgari retreated to his cot in abject
silence. His wheedling and agitating, his
problem-solving and peacemaking, had
sustained him in Youngstown. “After two
or three years of legal fight on a nonsense
case, I’m still paying,” he told me.
Nonetheless, he adjusted. Just a cou-
ple of weeks later, he joked, “If I have to
be imprisoned by ice, send me here.”
Mixing with the local prison population
energized him. He felt sympathy for the
desperation that had led the American
inmates to drugs and crime. “They’re boys
from the middle of nowhere,” Asgari told
me. “There’s something about them I
really like.” He was teaching again, this
time about renewable energy: electric cars,
lithium-ion batteries, solar cells. He even
came to think of the officer who had
warned him not to be a kingpin as his
“close friend.” He told me, with affection,
“She has a strict face and a golden heart.”
G
iven that Asgari had pledged to
self-deport, his extended deten-
tion was almost impossible to fathom.
His lawyers chalked it up to spite. New-
man, the head of the defense team, said,
