In August 1981, an international political crisis briefly unfolded on an ordinary stretch of Grand Avenue in Englewood, New Jersey.

Englewood Police responded to complaints about several men sleeping in a van with Texas license plates. When officers approached and asked for identification, the men reportedly said their papers were in an apartment upstairs. Police followed them to a small two-bedroom apartment above a gift shop. Inside, they discovered roughly sixty Iranian men crowded into the space—many sleeping wherever they could find room.

The men identified themselves as Iranian students and political activists. They were supporters of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of Iran who had been removed from office earlier that year after a power struggle with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Following Bani-Sadr’s ouster, many of his supporters fled Iran or organized opposition efforts abroad. These students had been participating in demonstrations and a hunger strike in New York, protesting the Khomeini regime and expressing solidarity with Bani-Sadr and other opposition figures.

When questioned by authorities, most of the men refused to identify themselves or provide documentation until they could speak with a lawyer. Because of that refusal, federal immigration officials took them into custody and transported them to Newark for processing. Officials initially indicated that many appeared to be in the country legally, but their unwillingness to provide identification led to arrests on immigration charges.

The group continued their hunger strike while in custody. Negotiations between their attorneys and immigration authorities followed, centering on bond amounts and the status of one man who faced an outstanding deportation order. When those negotiations collapsed, the students resumed fasting in anticipation of deportation hearings.

Englewood officials later stated that the men had not broken any laws simply by staying in the apartment. The situation escalated primarily because they would not identify themselves. What began as a neighborhood complaint about men sleeping in a vehicle had quickly turned into a federal immigration matter, drawing attention to Englewood during a moment of heightened tension between the United States and post-revolutionary Iran.

The episode remains a striking example of how global political upheaval—in this case the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the fall of Bani-Sadr—could surface in unexpected places, even in a small Bergen County city far from Tehran or Washington.