Jessica Tarlov: POTUS Needs Some Moral Support

Tim Miller (0:00)

Hey, everybody, it's Tim. I got a few items and something to get off my chest before I get to Jessica Tarlov. I'm very excited to have on the show today. Big news, we're going to do another fundraiser live show, this time in Dayton, which is really close to Springfield, Ohio. The proceeds are going to go to the Haitian community in Springfield. It's been something we've been wanting to do. It's in two weeks. So if you're bored on September 25th, and you don't have anything on your calendar, come on, fly to Dayton. Come hang out with us. You can see, I don't know, some airplane museums. There's got to be other stuff to do in Dayton, or you can just hang out with me. It's going to be a really good time. You can go to thebulwark.com/events to get tickets, proceeds to charity. For people who can't come, we'll obviously give you an opportunity as well to support the community after just the horrifying suicide of Pierre and just all these other stories and the videos of Markwayne Mullin shackling the Haitians who did nothing and putting them on these deportation flights back to the hell. We got too upset about it and we felt like we had to do something. We'll be in Dayton September 25th, bulwark.com/events. It also has the details for Columbia, which goes to selling out and then Charlotte and Atlanta in October. Also, you should be buying Sarah's book. Have I mentioned that? Sarah has a book out. You should probably be buying that as well if you haven't. Here's what I want to rant about. I wrote an article yesterday for The Bulwark. It's something I've talked about a couple of times on the podcast. It is a woman, Maryam Tahmasebi, and her husband Issa and her son, who have been in internment camps in Texas for over five months now, separate ones. Husband is in a literal prison camp, and Maryam and her son are in Dilley, the Dilley Detention Center, which we've been covering here in horrible conditions. The family has done nothing. It's literally Japanese internment, but for Iranians, they're in this detention center because they are Iranian, because Issa's mother was one of the hostage takers in 1979, which is awful and horrible and condemnable and everything, but none of these people were even born in 1979

We are imprisoning them just because of their bloodline. They've been in there with no accusations of crimes, no jury, no due process, poor medical treatment for months.

Maryam gets email one hour a day and she's been emailing with me. I included some of the emails in the article. Please check it out. The headline of it is Marco Rubio's Punishing a Teenage Boy for His Grandmother's Sins. The first email Maryam wrote me was about how she wanted, she just wanted her son to celebrate his birthday in freedom. This is a boy that got shackled and surrounded by vans at school drop-off, where his friends could watch because his grandmother did something in 1979

It's fucking unimaginable. I wrote about it yesterday and Maryam first wrote for The Nation, which is what drew my attention to it and much credit to The Nation for covering it. But last night, I was like, I don't understand why this isn't giving me more attention.

I feel like if I went back in a time machine and we're chatting, and it was whatever, 15 years ago, and we said, hey, in 2026, we're going to be doing internment camps for Iranians and Venezuelans, I think we would have just assumed that would have been a pretty major news story.

This is something that we are taught about in history books, one of the horrors of what our country has done, one of the darkest chapters in our country's history. I was learning about Japanese internment and the way we treated the Japanese in high school, probably when I was about Maryam's son's age. It's like we're doing it again, and it's like nobody's even covering it. I searched Google News this morning for Maryam's name and looked back through. When it first happened in April, Marco put out a press release where he tried to react about how screaming Mary or whatever the grandmother's name is, her family, he's taken away their green cards. At that time, there were a few articles about this. The Hill wrote about it at some local places in LA. The New York Post wrote a lot, waving the bloody shirt about how happy the people at the New York Post are that we are keeping this child in a prison camp. New York Post was very excited about that, so they've written about it several times talking about how great it is. Besides that, Newsweek probably is the best other article about this. They wrote something back in April. Again, April is what, four months ago now? Five? Here's a CBS article. It's like, oh, there was one mainstream media outlet article from our friends at Barry Weiss' CBS. This is April 11th, 2026 It was written by Mark Osborne. Mark writes this, the United States has revoked the green cards to detain the family of Iranian regime propagandists. Issa, Maryam, and their son have been detained by Issa ahead of their deportation, the department said in the statement. Hashemiya's wife both worked as professors. She goes on to talk about Issa's mother. Then they quote Marco. We talk about how they came on a visa issued in 2014, how they're lawful permanent residents.