Biography
Shamim Mafi is a 44-year-old Iranian national, a lawful permanent resident of the United States since 2016, who lived in Woodland Hills, California prior to her arrest. On the evening of April 18, 2026 she was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport by federal agents and charged in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California with a single count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), 50 U.S.C. §1705. The prosecution alleges she brokered the sale of Iranian-manufactured drones, bombs, bomb fuses, and millions of rounds of ammunition for transfer to Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
If convicted she faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in federal prison. Her initial appearance was scheduled for the afternoon of April 20, 2026 in downtown Los Angeles. She is presumed innocent. The indictment was announced by U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bilal Essayli, a Trump-administration appointee with a politically prominent profile in Iranian-American policy circles.
The case is included in the NPPC database because IEEPA — the federal sanctions statute under which Mafi is charged — has been criticized by civil-liberties groups and Iranian-American legal-defense organizations for its disproportionate use against Iranian nationals and dual citizens in cases that often blend genuine export-control concerns with politically-coded prosecution. The defense bar has long argued that the statute's broad reach allows the government to criminalize conduct, including ordinary commercial transactions touching Iran, that would not be charged against defendants from other sanctioned jurisdictions. Mafi's prosecution will be watched as a test case for how aggressively the current administration pursues IEEPA enforcement against permanent residents of Iranian origin.
