Posted on: Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Iranian gets eight months, may be deported

By David Waite
Advertiser Courts Writer

A 44-year-old Honolulu man who entered the United States from Iran on a student visa and never left was sentenced to eight months in federal prison yesterday for lying to officials about his citizenship.

But Manoorchehr Kavehpisheh, who has been held at the federal detention center on O'ahu since his arrest weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, faces a more daunting fate: once he is released from custody, government officials will determine whether he should be deported.

Kavehpisheh told federal Judge David Ezra that unless he is granted asylum in the United States or some other country, he faces almost certain execution in Iran because he converted from Islam to Christianity shortly after arriving in the United States in 1974.

Kavehpisheh said he never applied for U.S. citizenship, as his mother, father and some siblings did, for fear that an "Iranian death squad" might track him down.

But Ezra said many large cities across the country have significant populations of Iranians who have emigrated to the United States and live openly without fear of becoming death squad targets.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Sorenson said Kavehpisheh had a "propensity to live on the periphery" and made a good living dealing in international drivers' licenses and questionable passports.

"A lot of people out there have false identity documents as a result of Mr. Kavehpisheh," Sorenson said.

Ezra said the reasons given by Kavehpisheh for not seeking asylum in the past 28 years "simply are not credible."

Although there is no evidence to indicate that Kavehpisheh was involved in any way with the terrorist attacks last fall, the terrorists "used the services of others like you" to obtain false documents that allowed them to enter the country, Ezra told him.

Kavehpisheh told Ezra that his company's Web site merely steered people to a legitimate humanitarian organization in New York that issued the international drivers' licenses and passports.

William Domingo, a deputy federal public defender, said outside the courtroom after the sentencing that federal agents "just showed up at (Kavehpisheh's) door one day" shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and began asking questions about his citizenship.