US officials coordinated deportation flights with Iran, emails reveal

Poinews.com – US immigration officials coordinated with Iranian authorities to deport Iranian nationals in 2025, newly released emails show, despite rising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Hundreds of emails obtained by the National Iranian American Council and released on Tuesday detail how officials arranged three deportation flights that returned more than 100 Iranians to Iran between September 2025 and January 2026. The emails suggest Iranian officials had some influence over which Iranian nationals were deported, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appearing to accept some last-minute changes to deportation lists requested by Tehran.

“Per request from the Iran Embassy, I added a few cases," one unnamed ICE official wrote in late August, a month before the first deportation flight in September. Just over a week later, someone with the same job title moved to make another, unspecified change to the deportation list after they said they met with the “Director at the Iranian Embassy.” “Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process,” the official wrote. Iranian officials said in September 2025 that up to 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration.

Most had entered the US illegally through Mexico, while others faced different immigration issues, according to Tehran. The emails do not make clear how often US immigration officials were in direct contact with the Iranian government. Some communications were relayed through Qatari officials, who helped arrange deportation flights via Doha, while others referred to regular meetings with the “Iranian delegation,” the “Director at the Iranian Embassy”, and other unnamed Iranian officials.

It is not clear whether the people Iran put on the list had volunteered to be repatriated or if they were forced. Previous reporting from The New York Times revealed that asylum-seekers were among those deported to Iran, while others said they were deported against their will. The emails suggest that the push to carry out the deportations came from senior levels of the Trump administration, even during the 12-day conflict involving the US, Israel and Iran in June 2025.

The emails show that, on several occasions, ICE officials arranged meetings for unspecified reasons between Iranian officials and people detained in the US. The accounts echo testimony from Iranian asylum-seekers in an unrelated lawsuit filed in July by an unaffiliated Iranian interest group. Eleven Iranians in immigration detention said they were forced to meet with Iranian government officials while in ICE custody.

According to sworn declarations filed in a Washington DC court in July, the Iranian officials knew intimate details about their asylum claims. The lawsuit alleges that US immigration agencies have been illegally sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum-seekers with the Iranian government. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) strongly rejected the allegations in the lawsuit.

“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” DHS said in a statement in July. US authorities are allowed to work with foreign governments to coordinate deportations. However, federal regulations prohibit the disclosure of information that could reveal that a person facing deportation had applied for asylum.