THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 43
the doctor refused another flight—
whether it was bound for Cleveland or
Tehran, Asgari never knew. He asked
for a plastic chair to bring into the
shower so that he wouldn’t have to stand,
and again he was battling protocol—a
protocol whose logic no one remem-
bered, or maybe ever knew. If only ice
would release him to his daughter,
Asgari said: “Let me have four days,
and I’ll be at home watching TV and
eating Persian food.”I
n late April, Asgari’s pod lost its bid
for isolation: the prisoners were forced
into a new space with dozens of others.
Asgari tested positive for covid-19 on
April 25th. He awoke at night drenched
in sweat. When we spoke, he sounded
weak and coughed incessantly. He was
placed in a “negative pressure” cell that
kept infected air away from other de-
tainees. He had no shower and limited
access to a phone, and only a large black
spider for company. At least his oxygen
levels held steady. While Asgari was in
the negative-pressure cell, a magistrate
recommended that his habeas petition
be denied, on the ground that Asgari
was already infected, and therefore no
longer at risk.
When his fever broke, he was placed
in a pod of confirmed covid-19 pa-
tients. The outbreak ultimately affected
nearly two hundred prisoners. Asgari
was—for once—lucky. But upon his re-
covery he bridled more than ever at thefilth and the irrationality of his circum-
stances. Every other avenue having failed,
his wife started talking in earnest with
the Iranian foreign ministry.
Iran and the U.S. had exchanged a
pair of prisoners in December, and had
since been discussing another. Michael
White, a U.S. Navy veteran sentenced
to years in prison in Iran for allegedly
insulting Ali Khamenei, the Supreme
Leader, was to be swapped for Matteo
Taerri, a plastic surgeon in Floridahe advocated impartiality and fairness.
I believe these are global values that
should be respected by all governments,
including my own.” He added, “My at-
torneys, who put their heart into this
thing—they were employees of the same
government that was on the other side
of this case.”
What a comedown it had been to
pass out of the judiciary and into the
hands of ice. There, he had been wit-
ness to values that appeared to stand in
bald contrast to those of the courts. He
was staggered by the number of detain-
ees who, he felt, had no business being
imprisoned, and by brutal treatment
that seemed at odds with the liberality
of American law. Asgari was convinced
that a hidden profit motive lay behind
the circulation of ice prisoners on des-
ultory flights from one outpost to an-
other. Otherwise, he simply could not
understand it.
Who were he and the other ice de-
tainees in the eyes of American law?
The zone they occupied was murky to
the point of darkness. To win release on
supervision, people who had been im-
prisoned precisely because they were to
be deported had first to prove that they
weren’t flight risks. Their detention was
considered administrative, not punitive,
but they were housed in the same facil-
ities as people convicted of crimes.
Prison was a crucible of human re-
lations, and for the most part Asgari’s
faith in them had emerged stronger
from the experience. In a pod, you
couldn’t hide behind an avatar, a bank
account, or an accomplishment—not
even behind the self-importance of a
busy schedule. Governments might seek
to dominate or obliterate one another,
but human beings, forced into intimacy
and the roughest equality, tended to be
coöperative, Asgari had found. He had
always been a scholar of microstruc-
tures, and now he understood that the
atoms of a society—from which all its
properties emanated—were people in
their elemental state. The bonds among
them were the structure’s deepest source
of strength.
At Winn, time spun circles. New
detainees would show up at the gate,
and a lookout would whistle for pod
members to mob the door and prevent
entry. Asgari saw the doctor for new
bruises on his leg, and, on his behalf,
charged with sanctions violations for
smuggling a dual-use biological filter
into Iran. The countries were to ex-
change the two men through Swiss in-
termediaries. In the spring, the Iranians
decided to make Asgari’s deportation a
precondition for the deal: they would
honor their part of it only after ice sent
Asgari back to Iran.
At the beginning of May, intima-
tions of a swap leaked in the U.S. press,
and some articles mentioned Asgari’s
name. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting Dep-
uty Secretary of Homeland Security,
claimed to the Associated Press that the
U.S. had been trying to deport Asgari
since December, and that the Iranians
had delayed confirming the validity of
his passport until late February, when
the pandemic struck, making interna-
tional travel impossible.
In late May, a Louisiana court de-
cided to approve Asgari’s habeas peti-
tion after all, and gave ICE two weeks
to release him on supervision. But be-
fore that could happen, in early June,
after seven months in ice custody, he
was finally deported. He called me from
his country house, in Taleghan, in the
mountains north of Tehran, on June 4th.
He was jet-lagged, still feeling the shock
of sudden freedom, and overwhelmed
by the taste of food. High-ranking Ira-
nian officials had received him. Local
news media clamored for interviews,
clearly eager to present him as an em-
blematic victim of American injustice.
For now, he declined; he did not want
to present his case in a political light.
His story, he insisted, was really about
the relationships that had sustained him.
Still, memories of his incarceration, par-
ticularly at Winn and in Alexandria, in-
truded on his thoughts. He was sad to
learn that a guard he’d known at Winn
had died of covid-19. “He was a gen-
tle guy,” he told me. “I never saw any
aggressive behavior from him.”
Asgari had meant to return to Iran
the way he had left it—as a cosmopol-
itan scientist, beholden to nothing more
absolute than reason or more funda-
mental than the atom. “I do not like to
be swapped,” Asgari had told me when
the idea first arose, back at Winn. “I
wanted to win this case in an Ameri-
can court, before an American judge
and jury. Because I knew I hadn’t done
anything wrong.”