42 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
“Let this guy go around.”• •
hear from him within an hour he had
likely been taken to an isolation cell, and
I should then call his family. Ten min-
utes later, he was back on the line, against
a background roar of inmates cheering.
Asgari had led the pod in mobbing
the entryway. He told the guards that
he was fighting for his life and would
not give in. His cellmates backed him,
and the newcomer was led away. “Now
people are happy,” Asgari told me. “Not
one showed weakness.” When a new
shift of guards arrived, Asgari said, they
thanked him: they, too, felt safer because
of what he’d done. A prison staffer who
had witnessed the scene later told Asgari
that he had been thrilled when Asgari
had vowed to fight for his life, and had
asked the other detainees if they would
fight for theirs, too. Everyone had yelled,
“Yes!” The staffer told Asgari, “I felt like
I was in a movie.”
Asgari’s high spirits lasted only about
three days. His right leg began to swell,
purpled with bruises along a bone that
he’d never injured. It became agonizing
to walk the hundred feet from his bed
to the pod door, where medicines were
disbursed, or to the toilet. He was de-
nied a wheelchair; a nurse offered him
ice instead. At last, he saw a doctor, who
suspected a blood clot and had him
rushed to a hospital for an ultrasound.
The doctor there also suspected clots,
though they were too small to show on
the ultrasound, and he told ice that
Asgari should not fly. Asgari did not
seem entirely sorry that plans for his
deportation were again delayed. If he
stayed in the U.S. a little while longer,
he told me, he might be granted habeas.
“I want to show these guys they were
wrong,” he said.
Asgari was relentless in pursuit of a
cause—and there was always a cause.
The hospital gave him crutches, but
using them hurt his back, and within
two days he’d sent them to a nurse, with
a note demanding a wheelchair. Proto-
col forbade it, he was told. In protest,
he enlisted his cellmates to drag him
to his destinations on a bedsheet. (At
one point, he told me, laughing, “they
dragged me on the floor so fast, my ass
was set on fire.”) How else, he asked a
nurse, was he to transport himself? One
day, a guard quietly placed a wheelchair
inside the pod. Asgari attributed such
victories to what he called the “power
of one.” He told me, “An innocent, in-
dependent, wise individual will prevail
in any situation.”A
t Winn, Asgari had time to reflect
on his experience. He had always
lived, in a way, at a crossroads. He’d ar-
rived as a student in the University of
Tehran’s department of metallurgicalengineering in 1977, just as Iran’s revo-
lutionary student movement gathered
force, and his faculty was its epicenter.
When the movement toppled the Shah
and established the Islamic Republic,
Asgari helped form an organization
called the Jihad of Construction, an Ira-
nian counterpart to the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers. He coördinated crews to
build roads, pipe water, and harvest
wheat. The Iran-Iraq War began in 1980,
and the engineering students turned to
military logistics. To move tanks onto
the Al-Faw Peninsula, they helped de-
sign a pontoon bridge that had to be
installed underwater in the middle of
the night and then buoyed to the sur-
face with air tanks. Asgari took part in
five offensives; he saw bodies ripped
apart, and once a mortar shell landed
just behind him, causing the surround-
ing mud to boil.
Asgari had been a revolutionary not
because he was a religious ideologue but
because he was an egalitarian. He be-
lieved that social justice took precedence
over any theory of the state. What sur-
prised him most, when he first came to
America, in the nineties, was that such
a calm, orderly society had risen from
the cruel machinery of capitalism.
He believed that his time in deten-
tion had given him a more complete
picture of American society than most
citizens possessed. “I have friends in
low places,” he often told me, with a
chuckle. He’d spent two years in the
federal court system and five months
in the clutches of ice, all because the
F.B.I. had tried and failed to recruit
him, and because his visa—if it really
was a visa—had never been stamped.
Now, in an ice detention center on the
Texas-Louisiana border, he was having
a Tocqueville moment.
Asgari still viewed America with
affection. He marvelled that, in every
prison, he could pick up a phone and
talk to journalists, and that journalists
could publish what they wanted with-
out fear of being censored. But what he
appreciated most was the independence
of the American judiciary.
“I appeared as an Iranian in front of
an American judge,” he reflected. “This
American judge ruled against an F.B.I.
agent in my favor. I was privileged to
witness the way he handled the trial,
from jury selection to the end, the way