PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Attorneys representing the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit that alleges the Trump administration made a secret agreement with the Iranian government in March 2025 to hand over lists of Iranian citizens the administration planned to deport, along with their immigration files and asylum claims. The lawsuit alleges that this agreement violates federal law.
“The law is very clear that that information should not be revealed, and yet our information indicates that the U.S. government, for over a year now, has been regularly providing that kind of information to the Iranian government,” said Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with the organization Public Citizen, which is representing the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund.
The US government has deported between 115 and 125 Iranians since last September, according to the lawsuit.
An Arizona’s Family investigation traced three deportation flights on which the people on board ended up in Tehran. Two of those flights departed from the ICE facility at the Mesa Gateway Airport. The last one left on January 25, which was when the Iranian government was brutally cracking down on dissidents and protesters.
The attorneys who filed the lawsuit said revealing asylum claim information to the government of Iran put the deportees in a potentially life-threatening situation.
“It’s extremely dangerous because people are revealing in their asylum application the reasons that they fear persecution by the government of Iran if they’re returned. So it might be that they participated in pro-democracy demonstrations, which would put them at risk once they’re back in Iran. It could be that they’ve converted to Christianity, which is a crime in Iran. It could be that they’re part of the LGBTQ community, which, again, is a crime in Iran, ” said Kirkpatrick.
Arizona Congresswoman Yasmin Ansari, who is of Iranian descent and has spoken out on this issue in the past, issued a statement that reads in part, “If true, this would be a shocking betrayal of our legal and moral obligations.”
The Department of Homeland Security denies the allegations in the claim.
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