Latest news with #Torosian
Newsweek
a day ago
- Politics
- Newsweek
Woman Suffers Medical Emergency While Being Detained by ICE Agents
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. An Iranian woman experienced a medical emergency while being detained by masked immigration agents outside her Los Angeles home. During the operation on June 24, the woman appeared to suffer a severe panic attack after witnessing her husband's arrest by Border Patrol agents, according to NBC4 Los Angeles. In distress, she called her pastor, Ara Torosian, for help. "In one moment, I felt that I'm in the street of Tehran, under fear, under dictatorship," said Torosian, a pastor at Cornerstone Church in West Los Angeles. In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security said: "Agents immediately contacted EMS and escorted her to the hospital. Agent presence at the hospital was solely to guard the subject receiving medical care—a standard procedure when an individual in the country illegally requires medical attention." The woman has since been discharged from hospital and remains in custody. Newsweek has contacted DHS by email and the pastor via Instagram for comment. An Iranian woman experienced a medical emergency while being detained by masked immigration agents outside her home. An Iranian woman experienced a medical emergency while being detained by masked immigration agents outside her home. Ara Torosian Why It Matters President Donald Trump's immigration enforcers are facing intense scrutiny as the Republican-led administration carries out plans to remove millions of migrants without legal status as part of a mass deportation policy. The raids - some of which have been viewed as heavy handed - have prompted nationwide protests. What To Know Torosian told NBC4 Los Angeles that federal agents detained several members of his congregation on Tuesday, including the woman's partner. The names of those arrested have not been disclosed. The pastor said he had decided to cancel church services because many of his congregation were from the Iranian community and were now feeling afraid. "With lots of pain, I called them and said, 'Please don't come to the church,'" said Torosian. "I will miss them, and hopefully I can hug them and love them and preach for them again." Torosian said the couple are asylum seekers who left Iran, partly in fear of facing persecution due to their Christianity. However, DHS said that during a targeted enforcement operation in Los Angeles, Border Patrol agents apprehended two Iranian nationals who were unlawfully present in the U.S. and had been flagged as subjects of national security interest. Footage shared on Instagram shows the woman screaming and kicking her legs as she is being detained by federal agents. The pastor told NBC4 Los Angeles the agents said they had a warrant to detain the couple, although they did not show this to him. He said the couple had no criminal record and had been attending his church for more than a year. Torosian also told the outlet that five members of his congregation had been detained by federal agents this week, including a family with a 3-year-old daughter. Iranian nationals in the U.S. have come under increased attention following President Trump's recent strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) New York field office director told Newsweek that all Americans were at risk from Iranian sleeper cells. What People Are Saying Ara Torosian wrote in a social media post: "As an Iranian pastor at Cornerstone Church West LA, I watched in pain today as women—who fled Iran's dictatorship for freedom—were arrested outside their own home here in Los Angeles. They came seeking refuge, not another nightmare. This is not the justice they hoped for." Retired ICE agent Tom Decker told Newsweek: "Everyone in the United States are at risk by Iranian sleeper cells because of sanctuary cities." What Happens Next Both the woman and her husband are now in the custody of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), pending removal.
The Star
a day ago
- Politics
- The Star
Immigration officers arrest Iranian asylum-seekers in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Pastor Ara Torosian received a distressed phone call from two Iranian members of his Farsi-speaking church on Tuesday -- U.S. federal immigration officers were at their Los Angeles home to arrest them. It was the second such call he received this week. On Monday, an Iranian couple with a 3-year-old was detained at a routine immigration appointment, Torosian said. Both families were recently arrived asylum seekers, who had entered the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border after making an appointment, he said. The appointment system, known as CBP One, was launched by former U.S. President Joe Biden to promote orderly border crossings. President Donald Trump ended the program when he took office, as part of his aggressive crackdown on immigration. Torosian said when he arrived at the couple's home on Tuesday he saw an 'army' of federal law enforcement officers and began filming on his cell phone as officers stopped him from getting close to his church members. As officers restrained the woman being detained she started to have a panic attack and began convulsing on the floor, he said. 'She's sick! Call 911!' Torosian is heard shouting on the video. 'Why are you guys doing this?' Torosian said the couple fled religious persecution in Iran. In a statement on X, the Department of Homeland Security said that it detained two Iranian nationals in Los Angeles on Tuesday, who had been flagged for national security reasons. It said the woman was taken to hospital, but was later discharged and both are now in immigration custody. The arrests came after U.S. military bombers carried out strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities in the early hours of Sunday morning local time. In a press release on Tuesday, the DHS said it had arrested 11 Iranians in the country illegally over the weekend. Iran doesn't accept deportees from the United States, but on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face there. Torosian said his congregation has between 50 and 60 members, most of whom have been in the country for less than two years. He said he is telling them to stay home rather than come to church. "In a million years, a million years, I never imagined, one day I can call my members and tell them that better not to come to the church, because as I know, America is a free country, but they're afraid," Torosian said. "Some of them lock themselves in their house." Torosian himself is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He said the arrest he witnessed was traumatic. "When I was seeing the masked soldiers put down a woman, a female, on the ground, it triggered me," he said. "I'm on the street of Los Angeles or the street of Tehran? So that was what made me very sad and I cried a lot." (Reporting by Sandra Stojanovic in Los Angeles;Editing by Michael Perry)
Straits Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Straits Times
Immigration officers arrest Iranian asylum-seekers in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES - Pastor Ara Torosian received a distressed phone call from two Iranian members of his Farsi-speaking church on Tuesday -- U.S. federal immigration officers were at their Los Angeles home to arrest them. It was the second such call he received this week. On Monday, an Iranian couple with a 3-year-old was detained at a routine immigration appointment, Torosian said. Both families were recently arrived asylum seekers, who had entered the United States at the U.S.-Mexico border after making an appointment, he said. The appointment system, known as CBP One, was launched by former U.S. President Joe Biden to promote orderly border crossings. President Donald Trump ended the program when he took office, as part of his aggressive crackdown on immigration. Torosian said when he arrived at the couple's home on Tuesday he saw an 'army' of federal law enforcement officers and began filming on his cell phone as officers stopped him from getting close to his church members. As officers restrained the woman being detained she started to have a panic attack and began convulsing on the floor, he said. 'She's sick! Call 911!' Torosian is heard shouting on the video. 'Why are you guys doing this?' Torosian said the couple fled religious persecution in Iran. In a statement on X, the Department of Homeland Security said that it detained two Iranian nationals in Los Angeles on Tuesday, who had been flagged for national security reasons. It said the woman was taken to hospital, but was later discharged and both are now in immigration custody. The arrests came after U.S. military bombers carried out strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities in the early hours of Sunday morning local time. In a press release on Tuesday, the DHS said it had arrested 11 Iranians in the country illegally over the weekend. Iran doesn't accept deportees from the United States, but on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face there. Torosian said his congregation has between 50 and 60 members, most of whom have been in the country for less than two years. He said he is telling them to stay home rather than come to church. "In a million years, a million years, I never imagined, one day I can call my members and tell them that better not to come to the church, because as I know, America is a free country, but they're afraid," Torosian said. "Some of them lock themselves in their house." Torosian himself is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He said the arrest he witnessed was traumatic. "When I was seeing the masked soldiers put down a woman, a female, on the ground, it triggered me," he said. "I'm on the street of Los Angeles or the street of Tehran? So that was what made me very sad and I cried a lot." REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
NBC News
2 days ago
- Health
- NBC News
Iranian woman suffers severe panic attack as ICE agents arrest her husband
LOS ANGELES — Iranian asylum-seekers who fled the Islamic Republic in hopes of resettling in Los Angeles have been arrested recently by immigration officials despite having what lawyers and advocates consider credible-fear cases pending in court. The detentions follow a pattern developing throughout the country of targeting Iranians as tensions continue between the Trump administration and Iran. Many of the asylum-seekers are Christians who fled Iran and its intolerant views toward non-Muslim religions. There are 4 million Iranian exiles worldwide, just under a third of them in the United States, according to Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry statistics from 2021. The sudden detentions have prompted some Iranians to go on hunger strikes in custody and triggered at least one medical emergency during an attempted arrest. On Tuesday, an Iranian woman experienced a severe panic attack after she witnessed her husband's arrest near an area known as 'Tehrangeles' because of its large Iranian population. The woman called her pastor, Ara Torosian, to help intervene, but he could do little as he watched her panic attack escalate into convulsions. The couple's lawyer asked that the woman and her husband remain anonymous for privacy reasons. In a video recorded by Torosian and shared widely on social media, the woman lay on the ground spasming while masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hovered over her. Torosian can be heard pleading with them to administer medical aid. He can also be heard asking whether they know about the situation in Iran and why Christian Iranians fear returning to their native country. According to Torosian, the woman and her husband are members of his church and entered the United States last year under CBP One, the mobile app the Biden administration launched to streamline the asylum-seeking process. President Donald Trump ended the program shortly after he returned to office. The woman was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where ICE agents were met by immigrant advocates and detention protesters. Torosian said that he was not allowed into her hospital room and that immigration officials gruffly brushed away a nurse who tried to intercede on his behalf. UCLA Health said in a statement that it treated a patient under federal custody and later released the person. 'Despite reports on social media, there is no ICE operation happening at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,' the hospital said. A lawyer for the woman and her husband declined to comment. Immigration officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The incident left Torosian shaken, he said Wednesday. He arrived in the United States in 2010 as a Christian refugee and is now a U.S. citizen raising two children in Southern California. But the recent immigration raids and arrests, coupled with anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, remind him more of Iran than he ever imagined possible, he said. 'I was seeing a woman on the ground and masked people who wouldn't show their warrants,' he said. 'I was just shocked. Am I in Iran or am I in L.A.?' Another Iranian Christian family in Torosian's parish were arrested this week during a scheduled check-in with immigration officials. Seyedmajid Seyedali received a text over the weekend telling him to report to the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Monday with his wife and 4-year-daughter, said the family's lawyer, Kaveh Ardalan. Thinking it was a routine visit, the family of three left their dog at home. But when they arrived, they were taken to the basement and arrested despite having an asylum hearing scheduled for September, Ardalan said. They were transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where Seyedali's wife is on a hunger strike, he said. Ardalan said he has at least five Iranian clients who are seeking asylum and were arrested recently. He also has clients from Honduras and Venezuela with pending asylum cases who are now in ICE custody. When he can, Ardalan said, he will ask immigration judges to release eligible families on bond. Torosian said his parish is working to collect enough to pay rent for Seyedali's home should the family get released. "I'm ready for the fight," he said. "I'm standing for my people."
USA Today
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Does 2025 have a song of the summer? The internet has doubts
Does 2025 have a song of the summer? The internet has doubts Show Caption Hide Caption 'Superman,' Mission: Impossible,' 'F1' and summer's must-see films USA TODAY film critic Brian Truitt releases his list of summer's must-see films. The highlights include "Superman" and "Mission: Impossible." For friend groups carpooling to the beach this summer, there may not be a consensus on song choice. While Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" and Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" were among the tunes considered the 2024 song of the summer, there's no such clarity this time around. Music fans have voiced frustration with the lack of clear contenders for the 2025 title, saying no song has gained the same level of momentum as Carpenter's caffeinated earworm or Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-winning diss track "Not Like Us." The public has never unanimously agreed an definitive song of the summer, an unofficial honor that drives debate every year over which artist drops the season's true anthem. Every year, listeners pick a track they feel is emblematic of summer, from The Beach Boy's 1963 "Surfin' U.S.A" or The Police's 1983 "Every Breathe You Take" to Katy Perry's 2010 "California Gurls" featuring Snoop Dogg. This year, the internet has been scratching its head trying to figure out which track will reign supreme. The conundrum only became more apparent when Spotify shared 30 predictions for the 2025 Song of the Summer, a list the streaming giant said considered "cultural expertise, editorial instinct and streaming data." Social media users not only bashed the list, but the state of this year's summer anthems as a whole. Some went as far as saying 2025 might not have any songs of the summer. A song of the summer can't be forced to emerge Wyatt Torosian, a 34-year-old marketing professional from Louisiana, said the issue stems from artists tailoring their releases in the spring, with the hopes of becoming the song of the summer. In Summer 2005, the success of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" was indisputable, with the R&B soul hit playing at any store you walked to, Torosian said. Yet in this era, where musicians heavily utilize social media to promote their work, he argues music simply being made with the intention of going viral. "Everyone's designing music for a TikTok algorithm, and they're not actually making music that people want to listen to," Torosian told USA TODAY. "As artists keep designing songs for algorithms, there's going to be less and less songs that even have the staying capacity to last for an entire summer." Leo Pastel, an independent R&B songwriter based in Cincinnati, said record labels are often the ones vying to have the summer anthem more than the artists themselves. He believes musicians generally haven't been making the "upbeat, bright, happy songs" that epitomize the title yet, and urges labels to just accept that. "Fans will make something, and then like the companies and the labels will pick up on it a year later and try to force it," he said. "There's not really a Song of the Summer this year and I think everyone understands that, but the labels are trying to create it." As a musician himself, Pastel said most artists know better than to force their work to be trendy, adding "anytime you try to force something, it just ends up coming off inauthentic. So it really has to come from an authentic place for it to really connect." A true song of the summer is undeniable When a track is a true song of the summer contender, it's almost irrefutable. Pastel said they're the songs that listeners can't escape from at clubs, or that they can't help but play while riding their bike. Hit summer songs were easier to identify decades ago when radio stations and TV programs had listeners largely consuming the same media at the same time, according to Pastel. Yet as streaming platforms have given listeners more control over what music they listen to, he said it takes lot more for a song to stand out amongst the masses. "It's a lot more difficult for one thing to be ubiquitous and for everyone to be paying attention to it. So I think that it'll be a lot more rare for us to see those major cultural moments like we were used to in years past," Pastel added. Kristi Cook, a pop culture content creator in Los Angeles, noted it's sometimes easier to judge a song of the summer after the season ends altogether. "It takes you back to a smell. It takes you back to a moment in time, like a piece of clothing," said Cook, who has nearly 400,000 followers on her TikTok page Spill Sesh. "Like, it just really takes you back to where you were when you were listening to that song the most. When it was the most played at restaurants or bars." Could the 2025 summer anthem could drop any moment? Many social media users have completely given up on 2025 having a song of the summer, with the exception of devoted fans championing their favorite artists' new releases. Fans of Charli XCX are even pushing for hyper-pop "party 4 u" amid a popularity resurgence, despite the song being released in 2020. Meanwhile, artists like Doja Cat, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne, Miley Cyrus and A$AP Rocky are all expected to drop albums in the near future. But summer hasn't officially begun, and Cook is encouraging people not to throw in the towel just yet. "People are looking at it a bit negatively because they don't agree or they don't like these songs that are available right now," she said. "Everyone's waiting for the 'Espresso.' I feel like everyone's just waiting because they hear all these teases or they're hoping their favorites are going to drop a song." With the music world still left in suspense, USA TODAY asked Torosian, Pastel and Cook what they believe should be the 2025 Song of the Summer. Here's what they said.
