U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin speaks during a news conference in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 17, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Iran’s government used a diplomatic back-channel to request specific people by name from inside U.S. immigration detention — and internal emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show ICE complied — just days before the United States began bombing Iranian territory. A separate federal lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., alleges that before any of those individuals boarded a plane, U.S. officials had already handed their asylum application files to the same Iranian government they had fled. The Department of Homeland Security denies that asylum records were shared.
The emails, spanning May through November 2025 and released this week by the National Iranian American Council after a FOIA lawsuit against ICE, document the planning and execution of three mass deportation flights to Tehran — in September and December 2025 and January 2026 — that returned more than 100 Iranian nationals to a government the Trump administration simultaneously described as a dangerous human rights abuser.
“The same administration that promised Iranians that ‘help is on the way’ amid a deadly crackdown is now forcibly sending Iranians back into danger,” NIAC president Jamal Abdi said.
The Mechanism: Iran Chose Who Got on the Plane
The emails are not primarily a story about deportations — there have been deportations to many countries. They are a story about a specific mechanism: Iran’s government, operating through diplomats posted at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington (since the two countries have had no formal diplomatic relations since 1979), directly managed the composition of deportation manifests.
In a September 26, 2025, email — three days before the first flight departed — an unnamed ICE officer wrote that Iranian officials had issued travel documents for three specific individuals “and requested they be added to the flight leaving out on the 29th.” ICE officials then scrambled to gather those individuals from detention facilities in different states. A week earlier, in late August, the same pattern had appeared: “Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” another unnamed ICE officer wrote. Following a meeting with the “Director at the Iranian Embassy,” that official moved to make additional changes to the manifest, according to reporting by Reason Magazine.
The practical significance of this mechanism runs deeper than the back-channel itself. A federal lawsuit filed July 7, 2026, by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen Litigation Group alleges that U.S. officials arranged monthly meetings with Iranian representatives beginning in March 2025 — routing communications through the Pakistani Embassy — and during those meetings shared immigration files with Iran, including asylum applications. If the allegation is accurate, Iranian officials who were selecting deportees by name may have already known the specific grounds on which those individuals had claimed persecution: their religion, their sexuality, their political activity. Court filings include 11 sworn declarations from Iranian detainees who said they were compelled to meet with Iranian government representatives while in ICE custody — and that those officials already knew the details of their individual asylum case specifics. Federal regulations prohibit disclosing information that would “reveal or infer that the individual to be removed had applied for asylum,” under 8 C.F.R. § 208.6(a).
DHS has denied the core allegation: “These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” a department spokesperson said. In comments to multiple news outlets, DHS described its practice as routine consular notification — giving detained individuals an opportunity to contact their consular representatives.
Wartime Priority, Closed Airspace
The timing matters as much as the mechanism. On June 19, 2025 — while U.S. and Israeli forces were conducting active strikes against Iran during the conflict that became known as the Twelve-Day War — then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons sent an email from his BlackBerry directing removal operations head Marcos Charles to treat Iranian deportations as a “priority,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
Charles forwarded the order within the hour: “Please begin working on a plan to remove all removable FO [final order] Iranians in custody. We need a plan forward ASAP.” An unnamed assistant director of ICE’s removal division pushed back. Iran’s airspace was closed to all flights due to the ongoing conflict, travel documents were not being issued in a timely manner, and Iran was “currently uncooperative.”
The response from officials higher up the chain was to reach out to the State Department: “They need to help us identify a solution for this WH [White House] priority.” The ceasefire ending the Twelve-Day War arrived on June 24, 2025 — and within two months, Iranian officials became substantially more cooperative, with the emails noting that the Qatar channel “started as an Iranian initiative.”
As of June 2025, ICE records showed 522 Iranian nationals in agency detention — 244 with final removal orders — and more than 5,000 additional Iranians in deportation proceedings outside of custody. Between June and July 2025, ICE arrested between 290 and 300 additional Iranian nationals, according to data obtained by NIAC.
Qatar as Go-Between
Because direct diplomatic communication between Washington and Tehran is effectively impossible, much of the logistics were routed through Qatar. The primary American liaison was Joshua Coster, identified in the emails as the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv — a city, as the emails note without apparent irony, in a country that was itself at war with Iran and considers Qatar a rival.
Coster negotiated landing permits, passenger manifests, and the transfer protocol in Doha with Qatar’s Ministry of the Interior. The first flight departed the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, refueled in Puerto Rico, stopped in Cairo, and then continued to Qatar — where the 54 Iranian deportees were transferred onto a Qatar Airways charter that arrived at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran on October 1, 2025.
Qatar had been expecting 120 passengers. The Qatari Ministry of the Interior was not pleased. “We would like clarification on why the number of passengers has been reduced from 120 to 54, as this directly affects our internal operations,” a Qatari official wrote to ICE. “Last-minute changes are not welcome, especially since we are an intermediary with the Iranians.” No explanation appears in the correspondence.
One Wrong Person Deported
Amid the pressure to execute the flights quickly, at least one Iranian was sent to Tehran who was never supposed to be on the plane. On September 30, 2025, Coster informed colleagues: “An Iranian alien not included on the final manifest we sent to the Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight. This is unfortunate.” A colleague replied that they had no idea how the person had been put on the flight. That individual was transferred in Doha and flown onward to Iran regardless.
DHS did not respond to questions about this incident.
Who Was Sent Back
The circumstances of those deported have drawn alarm from human rights advocates and immigration attorneys. Among those placed on deportation manifests were individuals whose reasons for fleeing Iran — being openly gay, having converted from Islam to Christianity — are illegal under Iranian law and carry severe criminal penalties. At least one deportee told the New York Times he had attempted suicide before the flight and was physically forced onto the plane by ICE agents. Several deportees were summoned and interrogated by Iranian intelligence services after their arrival, according to reporting by the BBC and the New York Times.
The second deportation flight carried approximately 55 individuals and transited through Kuwait on December 7, 2025. A third flight followed through Kuwait on January 25, 2026, just weeks after Iranian security forces killed thousands of people during a nationwide protest crackdown.
A fourth deportation flight was scheduled for late March 2026. It never departed. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a new round of military strikes against Iran — closing the flight corridor again.
Contradiction at the Core of the Policy
The FOIA emails expose a contradiction that has run through the Trump administration’s Iran policy since at least February 2025, when Trump signed a national security memo announcing his “maximum pressure” campaign and declared that Iran “commits grievous human rights abuses and arbitrarily detains foreigners, including United States citizens, on spurious charges without due process of law.” The following January — as ICE was finalizing deportation lists — Trump issued public statements of support for Iranian protesters facing a government crackdown that killed thousands.
The emails make clear the administration was simultaneously working with that same government to identify and return specific individuals who had fled it.
“It demonstrates that the top priority here was to kick out as many people as possible by whatever means necessary,” Abdi said. “At the same time the U.S. and Israel were plotting a new phase of war with Iran, ICE’s attaché in Israel was coordinating to send asylees back to a government that threatens their lives.”
Immigration attorney Hassan Ahmad, who has represented several high-profile deportation targets, was blunter. “It seems that this administration will stop at nothing to make sure that these physical deportations actually happen, no matter what the cost, and they’ll just turn people over to despotic regimes.”
Under international law, the principle of non-refoulement — enshrined in Article 33(1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention and in Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture — prohibits states from returning individuals to countries where they face a real risk of persecution, torture, or other serious harm. That prohibition does not depend on whether a formal deportation order exists; it depends on whether the person faces credible harm upon return. For Iranians who had claimed asylum on grounds of political activity, religion, or sexual orientation — categories specifically criminalized by the Iranian government — the question of whether the deportations constituted refoulement is precisely what the IALDF lawsuit is now asking a federal court to address, according to OHCHR’s guidance on non-refoulement.
Decades of Protection, Reversed
The deportations represent a dramatic departure from U.S. immigration practice stretching back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For more than four decades, the absence of formal U.S.-Iran diplomatic relations made obtaining travel documents from Tehran nearly impossible — and Iranians with final removal orders were typically allowed to remain in the United States indefinitely, partly because of the documented persecution risk they faced upon return.
The Trump administration dismantled both of those protections: establishing the back-channel through the Pakistani Embassy and Qatar to obtain travel documents, and pressing forward with deportations despite the ongoing conflict, closed airspace, and the documented circumstances of those being deported, as detailed in the FOIA emails.
NIAC Policy Director Ryan Costello summarized the stakes: “These documents expose an operation that demands answers from the highest levels of government.”
What happened to the more than 100 Iranians already delivered into the Iranian government’s hands remains unknown.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow did ICE coordinate with Iran if the US and Iran have no diplomatic relations?
The two governments have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1979. Consular matters for Iranians in the United States are typically handled by Iranian diplomats posted at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C., which serves as an “interests section” for Iran. The FOIA emails show ICE officials referring to the “Iran Embassy” when they mean Iranian diplomatic representatives operating through this arrangement. The logistics of the flights themselves were routed through Qatar, whose Ministry of the Interior acted as an intermediary between ICE and Iranian officials, according to reporting by The Intercept and Reason Magazine.
Did the US government share Iranian asylum seekers’ confidential information with Iran?
That is the central allegation in a pending federal lawsuit filed July 7, 2026, by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen Litigation Group. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. officials held monthly meetings with Iranian representatives beginning in March 2025 and provided immigration files — including asylum applications detailing why individuals feared the Iranian government — to Iranian officials. Eleven detained Iranians submitted sworn declarations stating that when they met with Iranian government representatives in ICE detention facilities, those officials already appeared to know the specifics of their asylum claims. DHS has flatly denied the allegation, stating the charge that asylum records were shared is “FALSE.” The court has not yet ruled on the IALDF’s request for a preliminary injunction.
What is non-refoulement, and could these deportations have violated it?
Non-refoulement is a core principle of international refugee and human rights law — enshrined in Article 33(1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention and in Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture — that prohibits states from returning individuals to countries where they face a real risk of persecution, torture, or serious harm. The principle applies regardless of whether a deportation order legally exists; it depends on whether the person faces credible danger upon return. For Iranians deported on the basis of their sexual orientation, religious conversion, or political activity — all grounds for criminal prosecution in Iran — the question of whether these deportations constituted refoulement is actively before a federal court in Washington, D.C., according to OHCHR’s technical note on non-refoulement.
What happened to Iranians after they were deported?
Reports from the BBC and the New York Times indicate that several deportees were summoned and interrogated by Iranian intelligence services after arriving in Iran. At least one individual told the New York Times he had attempted suicide before boarding the flight and was physically forced onto the plane by ICE agents. The full accounting of what happened to each of the more than 100 deportees has not been made public. The IALDF lawsuit specifically cited the post-arrival interrogations as evidence that Iranian officials had advance knowledge of the deportees’ asylum claim details.