Washington (RNS) — ‘We all feel a wound in our body of Christ, knowing what’s happening to them,’ said the Rev. Fran Gardner-Smith.

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 GardnerSmith, 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.”

“No fun in the sun when you are unlawfully present,” the post read, continuing ” … the two women were arrested and transported to be processed for removal.”

The government agency’s post has rocked the small congregation, Gardner-Smith said, leaving the community — which includes other people from Iran — “gutted.”

“We all feel a wound in our body of Christ, knowing what’s happening to them,” Gardner-Smith said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But Parastoo G. Zahedi, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer now representing the sisters, rejected the claim that they were in the U.S. illegally. The Motaharis received notice that they were allowed to stay in the U.S. as their asylum claims are processed, Zahedi said, and had twice received employment authorization documents — the most current of which were valid through 2030. They were in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she said, on a family trip.

Zahedi also noted that she was alarmed by CBP’s social media post, as by publicly sharing images of the women, the government potentially heightened the risks they face back in Iran.

“What bothered me more than anything else is that they’re seeking asylum protection from the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I first saw the sharing of their information on Iranian social media sites,” she said. “Now, there are pictures of them without hijab, and it’s now common knowledge that they are in the U.S. seeking asylum.”

Zahedi added, “That’s something we expect the government to hold in confidence.”

The sisters’ arrest and potential deportation follows previous reports that President Donald Trump’s administration is deporting Iranian Christians with active asylum claims.