WASHINGTON (RNS) — When sisters Mahan and Mozhan Motahari first came to St. Thomas Episcopal Church in McLean, Virginia, in 2022, they were “deeply joyful,” said the Rev. Fran Gardner-Smith, the church’s rector. In Iran, their home country where they first encountered Christianity, they would have risked death, imprisonment or torture to be baptized publicly because it’s illegal for Muslims to convert.
But in Virginia, they were “finally able to practice their faith in the open,” Gardner-Smith told Religion News Service.
“They are regular hosts of our fellowship time after church,” she said, adding that the Maryland-based sisters were baptized in 2022, the same year they arrived in the U.S. “They are regulars at worship. They bring other members of their family with them sometimes. We have a pumpkin patch in the fall and so they’ve volunteered with the pumpkin patch.”
But the priest said she and her congregation were shocked when U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a photo of the two young women Wednesday (Dec. 3) on X and other social media platforms. In a caption, the agency claimed the pair had been arrested at an airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands when the women were “determined to be illegally present in the U.S.”
A Dec. 3, 2025, social media post by U.S. Customs and Border Protection about …