From BBC to ICE: How America Disappears the Voices It Can't Outargue
Yousof Azizi, Iranian-American analyst, educator, and commentator currently held in ICE detention. Take Action: Support Yousof Azizi Two active campaigns are organizing for his release and legal defense. Both are independently run by his community and supporters. Sign the petition: Release Yousof Azizi from ICE Detention on Change.org Contribute to legal defense: Support Yusof Azizi on FreeFunder
Share both links. Silence is the goal of every detention order. Defy it. On April 13, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived at the Maryland home of Yousof Azizi , a final-year PhD candidate in Public Policy at Virginia Tech. They took him without a criminal charge. His student visa was valid. His only verifiable offense was appearing on Sky News, BBC Persian, and Press TV
to argue that bombing Iranian civilians during Operation Epic Fury was, in fact, bad. Within 48 hours he was at Baltimore ICE Detention Center with visitation prohibited. By April 15, he had been shipped to Louisiana, the federal government's preferred memory hole for inconvenient foreign academics. By April 17, his wife received a brief phone call: he had been moved again, this time to Arizona,
against his will. The Department of Homeland Security's public justification, surfaced via Reuters, is that Azizi allegedly lied on a visa application filed in 2013. Thirteen years of silence on that paperwork, and the discovery happens to coincide with a war he opposes on camera. What a coincidence. The YouTube Erasure While Azizi sat in a Louisiana cell, YouTube terminated his channel. No strike