A man with direct ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to board a plane from Tijuana, Mexico to Los Angeles on Saturday, traveling with Iran's World Cup soccer team. He was posing as the president of Iran's football federation. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his team flagged the individual before he ever left the ground.
He wasn't the only one.
Mullin laid out the details on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. "When we started doing the research on him, he had only been put in place since 2022, and we didn't allow him to board the plane," Mullin said. The man was attempting to fly into Inglewood, California, where Iran was scheduled to face Belgium at SoFi Stadium.
The IRGC is Iran's paramilitary force, which reports directly to the Supreme Leader, and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and more than a dozen other countries. This isn't a gray-area intelligence outfit. It's on the list.
Mullin went further, telling Bartiromo that the problem extended well beyond one fake soccer executive. "The rest of the individuals that Iran had tried to bring in, all also had direct ties to the IRGC and aren't their normal traveling group," he said. Most countries bring roughly 120 people to a World Cup. Iran was limited to 53. Fourteen backroom staff and officials were denied U.S. visas outright.
The real president of Iran's football federation is Mehdi Taj, a former high-ranking intelligence officer with the IRGC. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already flagged the delegation weeks earlier. "We have no problem with the athletes or their support staff," Rubio said. "But what we're not going to allow is for them to embed in their delegation a bunch of people that we know have nothing to do with athletics and have ties to the IRGC."
All of Iran's players received visa approval. Their coaches and trainers got through. The people who got stopped were the ones who had no business being on a soccer trip in the first place.
Iran's football federation fired back, calling the IRGC allegations "fabricated and entirely baseless" and an "outright lie." They accused the United States of "discriminatory behavior and unreasonable restrictions" and said the visa denials had "effectively denied the Iranian national team the opportunity for a level playing field and a competition free from discrimination." The federation's statement called it "the worst possible form of politically biased interference in sport."
That's a bold claim from a federation whose own president is a former IRGC intelligence officer. The discrimination argument might land differently if the delegation hadn't included individuals the Department of Homeland Security flagged as having direct ties to a designated terrorist organization. It's hard to cry foul over a vetting process that caught exactly what it was designed to catch.
Mullin also noted a broader pattern beyond the World Cup delegation. "We've seen an unusual amount of Iranian nationals trying to sneak in through our Northern Border," he told Bartiromo, adding that U.S. and Canadian officials have been collaborating on apprehensions. This while Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iran.
Iran had already been forced to move its entire training operation from Tucson, Arizona to Tijuana after visa processing problems made a U.S.-based camp untenable. The team is permitted to enter American soil only the day before each match and must leave the evening after. They landed in Los Angeles on Saturday at lunchtime — barely 24 hours before kickoff against Belgium.
The World Cup is supposed to be about soccer. Iran's government decided it was also a convenient logistics channel for moving IRGC-connected personnel onto American soil under FIFA's umbrella. DHS caught it. The federation president has IRGC on his résumé. The delegation was stuffed with people who had nothing to do with the sport.
At some point, the "discrimination" defense stops working when every person you're defending has the same three letters next to their name.