On the recordMay 21, 2014
This week, I and many others were in Lafayette Park joining the family of Amir Hekmati, my constituent, to commemorate a very sad anniversary. For 1,000 days, Amir Hekmati, a young man born in the United States, grew up in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. His parents emigrated to the United States long before Amir was born, in the late 1970s, from Iran. Amir Hekmati has been sitting in a prison--in Evin Prison in Tehran, for 1,000 days. He traveled to Iran for the first time in August of 2011 because, like many other young men and young women, he wanted to explore his own roots. He had served in the United States Marine Corps, came home; and, before enrolling in school, he wanted to go visit family that he had never met and, in fact, wanted to meet his grandmother whom he had never seen before. He was there for about 2 weeks before he was arrested. For months, nobody knew where he was, and then soon it was revealed that he had been arrested, tried, and convicted of espionage. Because he was an American who had served in the Marine Corps, he was convicted of espionage. That death sentence that was initially executed on him was set aside, and that death sentence was suspended. Apparently, there had been a new trial, and he is now, according to a New York Times report, serving a 10-year sentence.…
