Yousef Azizi, an Iranian researcher, journalist, and Virginia Tech PhD candidate who lived in the U.S. for 13 years with valid legal status, was arrested in a pre-dawn operation outside his Maryland home on April 13 shortly after dropping his children off at school. Heavily armed FBI agents with rifles drawn handed him over to ICE, and during three months in detention he was shackled and transferred over six days from Maryland to Louisiana, Arizona, and California, including two nights in a freezing Arizona facility with 30 others. Authorities alleged without presented evidence that he had been affiliated with the Basij organization, and a judge denied bond despite 250 pages of support letters from professors at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Virginia Tech, and other institutions. Azizi, a regular media commentator critical of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, said an FBI agent twice threatened his wife, and he ultimately took a voluntary return to Iran, where he hopes to defend his dissertation remotely.