A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he’s no longer a citizen.
Story by Theresa Vargas, The Washington Post, 11/25/2023
Siavash Sobhani is stateless.
The Northern Virginia doctor knows at least that much about his situation. He knows he is no longer considered a citizen of the United States — the place where he was born, went to school and has practiced medicine for more than 30 years — and that he also belongs to no other place.
“I’m in limbo,” he told me on a recent afternoon.
In the past few years, there have been many passport-renewal nightmare stories, with processing delays forcing people to beg, lose sleep and miss once-in-a-lifetime trips. But what Sobhani has experienced this year after trying to renew his passport is uniquely unmooring.
As he tells it, when he sent in an application for a new passport in February, he had no reason to expect he’d face any difficulties. He had renewed his passport several times previously without problems. This time, it was set to expire in June, and he wanted to make sure he had a valid one in hand before his family took a trip in July.
But he did not receive a new passport. Instead, at the age of 61, he lost what he had held since he was an infant: U.S. citizenship.
A letter from a State Department official informed him that he should not have been granted citizenship at the time of his birth because his father was a diplomat with the Embassy of Iran. The letter directed Sobhani to a website where he could apply for lawful permanent residence.
“This was a shock to me,” said Sobhani, who specializes in internal medicine. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been here all my life. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve voted for presidents. I’ve served my community in Northern Virginia. During covid, I was at work, putting myself at risk, putting my family at risk. So when you’re told after 61 years, ‘Oh there was a mistake, you’re no longer a U.S. citizen,’ it’s really, really shocking.”
Sobhani shared with me the letter he received from the State Department, along with personal documents that detail his life in the United States and letters he had sent to local lawmakers asking for their help. Taken together, those records show how the Georgetown Medical School graduate went from living a stable life in the D.C. region to standing on uncertain ground and asking questions that do not have clear answers.
Some of those questions: Can he still legally practice medicine? Will the money he has earned over his career count toward his Social Security benefits if his Social Security number changes? Will he get to attend his son’s destination wedding next year?
Sobhani was hesitant to speak publicly about his situation. He has applied for permanent residence, as instructed, and he doesn’t want to do anything that might upset government officials who hold his fate in their hands. But he also knows how slowly the country’s immigration system can move, and he worries that he could wait in limbo for years if top officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) don’t hear about his case and agree to help him. He said he has already spent more than $40,000 on legal fees and still doesn’t know when his case might be resolved.
“I’m waiting for an interview, but does that mean I wait another year for an interview?” he said. “Then another three years for the next step? Then another 10 years before I can travel outside of the country?”
At his age — he turned 62 this month — he had already started to think about retirement. He and his wife planned to spend this year exploring other countries in hopes of finding a community where they could buy a home. Now, he can’t even visit a friend in London who recently had a stroke, or his father-in-law, who lives in Lebanon and is seriously ill.
“If he passes away, I can’t even go to his funeral,” Sobhani said.
Sobhani uses the words “upsetting,” “frustrating” and “distressing” to describe what he has been going through. His language is gentler than what many people would use if they suddenly lost the freedoms, protections and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship — all because of a paperwork mistake that was made when they were too young to read.
The U.S. government didn’t take away Sobhani’s citizenship because of anything he did. The letter points to a bureaucratic reason. It cites the 14th Amendment, which says children born in the United States to people with diplomatic immunity do not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
“As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States,” reads the letter. “As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.”
“But I did,” Sobhani said as he read that last line aloud. “They gave it me.”
They also reconfirmed he was a citizen over and over again throughout his life, every time his passport was renewed.
Sobhani said that after getting that letter, he started digging into his family’s history. He couldn’t ask his parents questions because his father is dead and his mother has dementia. What he discovered, he said, is this: His older brother, who was born in Kansas when their father was a military student, had a congenital condition that required surgery. To extend the family’s stay in the country for that surgery, their father obtained a temporary job at the Iranian Embassy and worked there in October and November 1961. A birth certificate shows Sobhani was born at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center that November.
Sobhani said his family lived in Turkey for several years when he was a child but that he returned to D.C. to attend Georgetown Preparatory School. He received degrees from George Washington University and Boston College before attending Georgetown Medical School. He said he cannot safely live in Iran because he has spoken out against the government and his brother ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2012.
Sobhani wrote letters to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) requesting their help, saying he had “the utmost respect for the laws governing this country.” He also noted that he has dedicated his career to helping people in Virginia and the D.C. region and has been “directly involved in the care of tens of thousands of lives, currently with an active patient panel of over 3,000 patients.”
“I can only hope that the impact I’ve made in caring for our community of Virginians, your constituents, for the past 30 years will hold some weight in swaying your decision to intervene on my behalf,” he wrote.
He shared a letter that Connolly wrote to a USCIS official on his behalf.
“I trust that you can imagine how difficult it must be to believe that you were a citizen of the U.S. your entire life, just to find out you actually were not,” Connolly wrote. He added, “Our office is respectfully requesting all possible consideration in expediting this case in accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.”
Sobhani said he hopes his citizenship will be restored within six months, but he has no idea if that’s a realistic expectation. He has no idea if he will have a passport in time to attend his son’s wedding in Portugal next year or if he will get to make those retirement scouting trips with his wife anytime soon.
He has no idea how long he will remain stateless.