![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/MDUyMC5qcGc.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n\n Filed
\n 6:00 a.m. EDT\n<\/p>\n
\n 05.29.2026\n<\/p>\n
\n Trump\u2019s State Department told Americans to avoid Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, South Sudan and other nations where the U.S. simultaneously deported people.\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Smoke rises after explosions struck Tehran, Iran, in April 2026. The U.S. government deported more than 200 people to Iran in the year before launching a war against it, despite the State Department warning Americans the country was too dangerous to travel to.
\n Tolga Akbaba\/Anadolu, via Getty Images\n<\/p>\n
In late January, the Trump administration was planning a war in Iran<\/a>, weighing possible airstrikes and staging aircraft carriers and other military ships in the region. Around that time, government officials deported 18 people to Iran, the last of them arriving just days before American and Israeli bombs began falling across the country.<\/p>\n These deportations were the latest in an aggressive campaign to deport Iranians from the United States, the first time in recent history the U.S. government had done so in large numbers. In the 13 months of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency leading up to the war, the United States deported more than 200 people to Iran, even as the State Department decried human rights abuses<\/a> by the Iranian government and warned U.S. citizens not to travel there \u201cfor any reason.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. government deported more than 21,000 people to countries that the State Department deemed too dangerous to visit, according to a Marshall Project analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Deportation Data Project<\/a> from Trump\u2019s inauguration through mid-March. These countries included war zones such as Ukraine, nations with unstable governments in disarray like Haiti and brutal dictatorships like Myanmar \u2014 places where travelers may face terrorism, wrongful detention and kidnapping, among other potential dangers. The overwhelming majority of those deported had no criminal convictions. At least 600 were children.<\/p>\n ICE did not respond to repeated questions about how and when it deports people to countries the State Department classifies as unsafe to travel.<\/p>\n Susan Akram, a law professor with Boston University\u2019s International Human Rights Clinic, called the deportations \u201cimmoral and totally inhumane\u201d and argued that they violate U.S. and international laws.<\/p>\n United States immigration law is complex and sometimes contradictory, but Akram and other legal experts point to international law that prohibits sending anyone seeking asylum to any country where their life or freedom is threatened; the United States adopted this law through the bipartisan 1980 Refugee Act<\/a>. The ICE data does not track how many of the people deported to those countries had made asylum claims. U.S. and international law also say that no one, regardless of immigration status, can be sent to a country where they may be tortured.<\/p>\n If the United States violates international law in the way it treats foreign nationals, it opens the door for other countries to treat U.S. citizens the same way, Akram said.<\/p>\n Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and a resident fellow at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said that anyone deported to one of these countries would have had multiple opportunities under U.S. law to contest their deportation. If they were deported, he said, it was either because they didn\u2019t fight their removal in immigration court, or they asked for protection and \u201ca rather robust due process system\u201d found it was not unsafe.<\/p>\n Since September, the U.S. government has deported three planeloads of people to Iran, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit that tracks ICE deportation flights<\/a>. Those on the planes included a Christian convert and a political dissident, both of whom human rights advocates warned were at risk of persecution in Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n The State Department\u2019s travel advisory system currently identifies 23 countries where U.S. citizens should not go, though the number fluctuates as countries stabilize, descend into conflict or are struck by natural disasters. The advisories pointedly say that the system \u201cdescribes the risks and recommended precautions for U.S. citizens \u2014 not foreign nationals.\u201d<\/p>\n Venezuela is one of the countries that, for years, the State Department warned citizens not to visit. While the U.S. government ranked it among the most dangerous countries in the world, the Trump administration deported over 18,000 people there, The Marshall Project\u2019s data analysis found. Around 200 of those were not Venezuelan citizens. The State Department recently downgraded Venezuela\u2019s status from \u201cdo not travel\u201d to \u201creconsider travel.\u201d<\/p>\n People were deported to Venezuela during the especially dangerous time immediately before and after the U.S. raids to topple its government and oust President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and his wife. According to ICE\u2019s data, in the week before and the week after the invasion, the U.S. deported more than 100 people there.<\/p>\n Venezuela was not safe before Maduro was deposed, and it\u2019s not safe now, said Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that investigates human rights abuses.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are entire neighborhoods that are controlled by criminal gangs that set up the rules and then kill people who don\u2019t follow their orders,\u201d Pappier said. \u201cGlobally, there are many cases of transparent hypocrisy of the U.S., in the same breath labeling a country as dangerous, and at the same time sending deportees there.\u201d<\/p>\n The countries that the State Department has deemed most dangerous also largely overlap with a list of countries whose citizens qualify for Temporary Protected Status. It is a system that Congress created to give foreign nationals a legal way to work and live in the United States while their country is not safe to return to.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has attempted to end Temporary Protected Status<\/a> for at least nine countries, including Venezuela, Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan. These places remain dangerous \u2014 the State Department\u2019s Haiti page, for example, warns of \u201ckidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.\u201d Removing the protection seems like a pretext to deport more people, said Jennifer Chac\u00f3n, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies immigration. \u201cIt flies in the face of what [Temporary Protected Status] is supposed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n More than 1,300 people were deported by the Trump administration to Haiti and hundreds more to Somalia and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Both Democrat and Republican administrations have elected to deport immigrants to countries in turmoil. During a period of heightened Haitian migration to the United States, the Biden administration deported tens of thousands of people to Haiti,<\/a> despite unrest there.<\/p>\n At the time the State Department had a \u201cdo not travel\u201d warning for Haiti.<\/p>\n Many of the Trump administration\u2019s changes to Temporary Protected Status have been challenged in court<\/a> and are tied up in litigation.<\/p>\n In hundreds of instances, the Trump administration deported people to countries with which it does not have diplomatic relations, including three people who, according to ICE\u2019s data, were deported to North Korea. In the case of Iran, the deportations required a rare cooperation between the two governments, according to The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just seems like a horrific policy,\u201d said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. The United States denounces the authoritarian and repressive Iranian regime, he said, \u201cwhile also preparing to send people back to that very government \u2014 and also then into a war that the U.S. was going to initiate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Filed 6:00 a.m. EDT 05.29.2026 Trump\u2019s State Department told Americans to avoid Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, South Sudan and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[4304,10882,3838,1680,45113,34,45112,7586,45111,293],"class_list":["post-136068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-deportation","tag-haiti","tag-ice","tag-immigration","tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","tag-iran","tag-second-trump-administration","tag-somalia","tag-temporary-protected-status-tps","tag-venezuela"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116657388773158201","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}