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An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a family member and state media news reports. The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.

The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced last week at a closed trial in Qom province along with eight band and crew colleagues.

A video of the 2024 performance, in which the singer’s hair, arms, and shoulders are uncovered, in defiance of Iranian law, went viral on YouTube.

Ahmadi and her colleagues were also banned from performing or leaving the country for two years, said the family member who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisal for speaking to the media. Two of the nine individuals sentenced were not in Iran when the verdict was announced, the family member said.

The sentencing came just days after Iran and the United States tentatively agreed to end a monthslong conflict that has killed thousands across the Middle East and sent shock waves throughout the global economy.

The government’s crackdown on artistic expression and women’s dress has dampened hopes among some Iranians for a more moderate postwar order.

“Besides being an inhumane and humiliating punishment, the 74-lash sentence against Parastoo Ahmadi simply for singing without compulsory hijab is a dangerous signal that the regime, emboldened by the peace deal with the U.S., may intensify its crackdown on women,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights.

The strikes against Iran by the United States and Israel that began in February killed several key figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who oversaw the violent and repressive theocracy over nearly four decades.

President Donald Trump justified the war, in part, by saying the United States intended to help Iranians overturn their leaders. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media in January.

That month, Iranian authorities responded to widespread protests by killing thousands of people. Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, called it a “state-orchestrated massacre.”

Now, it is not clear that the war has left Iran in less restrictive hands than before. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his father as supreme leader, and a group of hard-line senior members of the Revolutionary Guard has assumed an expansive role in running the country.

In 2022, there were also hopes that change might come for Iranian women. Large protests erupted after the death of a young woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of people.

During the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement that followed, more Iranians decided to flout the hijab rules, and violent crackdowns appeared to abate slightly, according to a U.N. report documenting the aftermath of the protests.

It was in that context that the video of Ahmadi’s 2024 performance, in which she crooned a set of patriotic folk songs while wearing a simple black dress, went viral. The caption read: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately.”

Ahmadi and two of her collaborators were briefly detained after the video was posted.

Now, with a postwar political order appearing to solidify in Iran, some in the country are looking at the sentencing of Ahmadi and her bandmates and wondering what it may mean for the future.

“Will this country ever be fixed one day?” said Mariam, 30, a teacher in Mashhad who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of reprisals. “Where in the world is a woman’s singing punishable by lashes?”

Iranian authorities have attempted to “project an image of normalcy” after the war, said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. But, she said, “cases like Parastoo’s expose the reality of the human rights situation in Iran: Women continue to face profound discrimination under the law, and defiance results in punishment and state violence.”

It was unclear when the authorities planned to lash Ahmadi and the other defendants. Since the 2022 protests, there have been multiple documented cases of the authorities whipping women accused of violating hijab rules or speaking out against them.

Court documents related to the trial have not been made public.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume using a fast-track deportation process throughout the country that is typically reserved for people apprehended shortly after crossing the southern border.

The decision revived a pillar of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, after a lower court ruled last August that attempts to use the procedure to potentially remove millions of people without immigration hearings most likely violated their due process rights and risked wrongful detentions.

In a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that it did not violate immigrants’ rights to use the policy to the maximum extent allowed by law. Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee. Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a dissent that he would have let the lower court’s ruling stand.

Writing for the majority, Walker wrote that Congress had delegated to the executive branch decisions about which migrants to designate for expedited deportations.

“For many years, while some were designated, others were not,” he wrote. “But that changed in January 2025 when the executive expanded expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress,” he wrote.

He added that the Homeland Security Department was not legally required to tell those arrested that they could avoid expedited removal if they could prove they had been in the country continuously for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” the opinion said.

Immediately upon taking office in January, Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use the process, known as expedited removal, against an expanded population of immigrants lacking legal status.

Expedited removal had been used narrowly for migrants lacking legal status who are detained near the southern border. It allows officials to deport people who have been in the country for less than two years without hearings in immigration courts.

Trump’s expanded policy encouraged agents to detain and designate for rapid removal migrants questioned even deep in the country’s interior if they could not produce proof on the spot that they had been in the country beyond that two-year threshold.

But judges have been deeply skeptical of the policy, noting that throwing out immigrants’ rights to challenge their removal in court could lead to abuse when carried out at scale.

During a hearing last December, the three-judge appeals court panel focused on how immigration agents had used the policy in 2025 before it was blocked by a lower court. Judges pressed Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the government, for specifics.

The three judges questioned why the government had waited until October 2025 to share with the court a policy memo circulated at ICE last February, which explained how and when expedited removal should be used.

The guidance instructed agents that if someone apprehended by immigration agents professed to have been in the country longer than two years, they should be given “a brief but reasonable opportunity” to provide documentation to avoid being placed in expedited removal. Walker wrote in the opinion Tuesday that as long as migrants are provided that “reasonable opportunity,” the requirements of the law had been fulfilled.

In his dissent, Wilkins wrote that the Department of Homeland Security had not disputed that in using the policy, it had deported a number of individuals who had been in the country longer than two years.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” he wrote.

In a statement, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the ruling. He wrote that the department had long “arbitrarily limited expedited removal,” though the law allows it to be used more broadly.

He said the appeals court had “vindicated” the Trump administration’s practices.

Anand Balakrishnan, a lawyer representing Make the Road New York, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, argued during the hearing last year that such groups had been in the dark about how the procedure had been used. He said that the decision to give migrants lacking legal status an opportunity to state their case and avoid being placed into fast-track deportation was being made by individual agents with little oversight.

“I don’t have any clue how this process is supposed to work in practice, particularly when the only check on it is that individual officer who is supposedly, in their discretion, providing them with time,” he said.

Balakrishnan said the aggressive expansion of the policy effectively left everyone without full legal status vulnerable to being placed on a fast track for deportation, including those who had lived in the country for decades and had deep ties to their communities or to U.S. citizens.

But Balakrishnan had faced skeptical questioning from Rao and Walker. At one point, Walker appeared to dismiss the case as an attempt to stall the deportation process nationally, rather than maintain what had for decades been a more circumscribed use of the expedited removal process.

Walker observed that all of the people challenging the policy were in the country illegally.

“So whether they get expedited removal or nonexpedited removal, the proper result is removal, right?” he said.

“I don’t know whether the proper result is removal,” Balakrishnan said. “I mean, the proper result would be procedures to access the relief that Congress has afforded them.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.